564 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



of twenty-five of whom are not able to cash 

 their store bills, and half of whom are un- 

 able to raise their mortgages, be made to 

 raise revenue to maintain the continuous flow 

 of free water for the machinery of monopoly? 

 The fact that forestry is stinted by nig- 

 gardly appropriations is greatly to be re- 

 gretted, but is no argument why the stock 

 raiser should be forced to pay an unconsti- 

 tutional and unreasonable portion of the 

 public revenue. 



Aaron W. Frederick, A.M. 



North Fork, Cal. 



(The main emphasis is laid, in this com- 

 munication, upon three points. It is urged 

 that the grazing charge is illegal ; that it 

 works injury to the forest; and that it sub- 

 jects the owners of stock to unreasonable 

 and exceptional hardship. But in conceding 

 the dependence of the stock owner upon the 

 public range, and admitting the need of regu- 

 lation, the writer surrenders his position at 

 the outset, the legality of the charge being 

 accepted as established. It is because the 

 summer range in the national forests is vital 

 to the maintenance of the live stock industry 

 in the west, and because the range, as the 

 writer concedes, "is more or less exhausted. ' 

 while "conditions naturally tend to grow 

 worse" for the stock men, that regulation 

 in their interest became urgently necessary. 

 All the rest of the present system of range 

 management within the national forests fol- 

 lows as a corollary from this conclusion. 

 Grazing fees are charged not as a source of 

 revenue, but in order to raise a fund for 

 administration purposes, for the progressive 

 improvement of the range, and for the pro- 

 tection of grazing interests. It was not the 

 existence of concurrent jurdisdictions which 

 resulted in the payment, under the present 

 law, of twenty-five per cent of the gross 

 proceeds of national forest business to the 

 states in which the business was done, but the 

 need of providing a substitute for county 

 tax incomes when land was withdrawn from 

 settlement to create the forests. 



It is felt that the weakness of the cor- 

 respondent's position is especially shown by 

 his references to the use of timber and of 



water-power sites. National-forest timber is 

 not disposed of to applicants who are known 

 to be seeking public stumpage in order to 

 withhold their own timber for speculative 

 advances to be obtained by monopoly when 

 the public timber shall have been cut to the 

 safety limit. But if the national forests had 

 not been created the whole of the western 

 forest would have fallen in time into the 

 hands of the big interests, against which the 

 consumer would not then have had the protec- 

 tion that he now enjoys by virtue of the exist- 

 ence of a competitive supply in the public 

 forests. 



With the water powers the situation is 

 similar. It is through no fault of those who 

 would anticipate and prevent the monopoly 

 of water-power sites that such ominous prog- 

 ress has already been made toward monopoly. 

 The water-power companies have fought a 

 conservation charge for the use of power 

 sites in the national forests and so brought 

 about this menacing state of affairs; and 

 their arguments in justification have been 

 based on the very line of reasoning along 

 which the writer of this communication ad- 

 vances against the only sort of regulation 

 that really regulates — namely, an equitable 

 charge for the use of public property for 

 private profit. 



Finally, if the small stock owner is to have 

 fair play in competition with the large stock 

 interests, the range can no longer be left to 

 free competition, because conditions have so 

 changed that "free competition" is the best 

 ally of tyranny and numbers against weak- 

 ness. The theory that might makes right on 

 the range is contrary both to sound economics 

 and to the square deal. As things were 

 going, there would very soon have remained 

 neither freedom of the range nor, indeed, the 

 range itself. And the brightest side of the 

 whole matter is that the stock men who 

 were suffering under the old regime of op- 

 pression are finding their lost opportunity 

 under regulation ; while the chief protestants 

 against the new range democracy are the 

 illegitimate monarchs of the range, whose 

 title rests upon the conquest not of stub- 

 born nature, but of weaker competitors 

 crowded out in the fight for a foothold. — Ed.) 



