THE PRESIDENT'S ANNUAL ADDRESS 



OON. JAMES WILSON, President 

 * * of the American Forestry Asso- 

 ciation, called the annual meeting to 

 order and addressed the members as 

 follows : 



Gentle;me;n of the; Association : 

 I am glad to welcome you to this meet- 

 ing, to the city of Washington, and to 

 congratulate you upon the progress 

 that is being made along so many lines 

 in the direction of forestry. There are 

 some gentlemen here, one in particu- 

 lar, who helped begin the National for- 

 estry system — Mr. Noble, of St. Louis. 

 And he no doubt will be quite as much 

 interested as anyone here in knowing 

 the progress that has been made in the 

 great work that he had so much to do 

 with inaugurating. 



The American people are learning 

 the actual conditions concerning the 

 forests of the country. It has been a 

 work of years, and will be a work of 

 years, before everything is done that 

 should be done along these lines. Our 

 country is a forested country by na- 

 ture. When the Pilgrims founded 

 New England and the Cavaliers 

 founded Jamestown there were for- 

 ests ; and for hundreds of years it has 

 been considered the proper thing to be 

 a good axman, cutting down trees and 

 destroying woods. And in that direc- 

 tion our forerunners have been emi- 

 nently successful. They have succeed- 

 ed in cutting down trees and destroy- 

 ing woods until it has become a ques- 

 tion with us now what we are to see 

 in the future, and what those who fol- 

 low us shall see, with regard to the 

 woods. 



You will pardon my saying a single 

 word about the National Forests. They 

 number over 162,000,000 acres, scat- 

 tered throughout the great Northwest. 

 The people there are learning that the 

 foresters of the United States are their 

 servants ; that the forester has no self- 

 ish aim to serve : that all his aims are 

 for the good of the people who are to 



be benefited by the American forests; 

 that the forest is to be something for 

 the benefit of those who live now and 

 for the benefit of succeeding genera- 

 tions, on and on toward all future 

 times. They are dealing with the 

 great trees of five hundred years' 

 growth ; they are dealing with the fires 

 that have been destroying so many 

 acres every year, and they are steadily 

 reducing the number of fires ; they are 

 studying the great problems of refor- 

 estation, something that is new to us. 

 Anybody can take a spade and plant 

 a tree, if he can get a young tree. It 

 does not take a very great deal of re- 

 search to ascertain how to germinate a 

 seed, but all the American army and 

 all the American navy and everybody in 

 Washington in the Governm.ent service 

 combined could not reforest the bare 

 lands in the forests of the United 

 States if they were all set to work at 

 it with a spade. It cannot be done. 

 We have to get a new plan of doing 

 things. Instead of planting as many 

 trees as a man can plant in a day in 

 the ordinary way — a few hundred — 

 the time of one man must result in re- 

 planting four or five hundred acres ih 

 a day. Machinery must be adapted to 

 the planting of tree seed. The prob- 

 lem how tree seed can be planted by 

 machinery must be wrought out ; and 

 it will be wrought out. The question 

 is not where to get enough of cheap 

 labor to do this work — the question is 

 how to encourage the intelligent la- 

 borer to do it. The American prob- 

 lem is not so much getting hold of 

 cheap labor as the making of intelli- 

 gent labor. 



I recollect some years ago, when I 

 was trying to encourage rice growing, 

 some patriotic citizens asked if I did 

 not know that I was wasting the pub- 

 lic money, because labor was so cheap 

 in the Orient that we could never com- 

 pete ; that we never could grow rice in 

 the United States, and we never could 



*Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Forestry Association, Wash- 

 ington, January 29, 1908. 



