EDITORIAL 



^^::^HE Agricultural Bill has just passed the House of Eepresentatives. It 

 ^^ contains a reduction of over one million dollars from the present appro- 

 priation for the Forest Service, and this cut is made almost wholly from 

 the funds available to prevent and fight forest fires. The current appropriation 

 of 1500,000 for building roads, trails, and telephone lines needed to call and 

 get men quickly to the fires is reduced to |275,000, and of the emergency fund 

 of $1,000,000 for fighting forest fires only one-fifth remains. The House, by 

 a vote of seventy-four to seventy, restored the $225,000 cut from the appropria- 

 tion for roads, trails, and telephone lines; but on the final reading of the 

 Bill, the amendment for this increase was defeated. 



These cuts are made in the face of the record of 1910, in which seventy- 

 nine fire fighters and twenty-five settlers were burned to death in the National 

 Forests, and twelve million dollars' worth of timber was destroyed; and in 

 the face of full knowledge, that as the result of insufficient appropriation, the 

 National Forests, which constitute about two billion dollars' worth of public 

 property, are in grave danger of even greater loss from fire. 



The protection of public property and of the lives of settlers, their wives 

 and their children, as well as of the public servants within the National Forests, 

 lies close to the public welfare. It is easy to malign the Forest Service, as 

 certain members of Congress are accustomed to do. But it is much easier 

 to malign the Forest Hanger than it is to do their brave and efficient work 

 on the fire line. We must not let false economy further imperil the safety of 

 public resources and the protection of human lives. 



It is time for Congress to face the facts. Before the National forests can 

 be made reasonably safe against fire, they must have ten times the present 

 trails and six times the telephone lines now built. It has taken six years for 

 Congress to appropriate enough money to build this small part of what is 

 urgently needed. The standing timber alone on National Forests is worth 

 not less than five hundred million dollars. In twenty years it will probably 

 be worth well over one billion dollars. If Congress gave the Forest Service 

 the five hundred thousand dollars a year it asks for, to build trails and tele- 

 phone lines, it would give only one-fourth of one per cent of the value of 

 timber standing to-day in the National Forests. 



The preservation of this standing timber controls the preservation of 



stream flow, whose value is many times that of all the wood which the 



National Forests contain. The value of the range in National Forests which 



again is largely dependent upon forest preservation, is incalculable. The fees 



for grazing alone bring into the public treasury every year twice the appro- 



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