APPENDIX. 55 



All well-considered legislation that results in preventing the setting 

 and checking the destructiveness of forest fires, the greater number 

 of which are caused by preventable carelessness, and such adjust- 

 ment of taxation as takes note of the great public interest there is 

 in the preservation of our woods, will tend to such prudent cutting 

 of timber lands as shall maintain their productiveness. It would 

 not seem to be impossible to effect by judicious legislation and the 

 support of public opinion, such a condition of things, that it would 

 be just as much the interest of the owner of a remote township in 

 our northernmost frontier, to take off only the mature growth of the 

 standing timber, as for the farmer to keep up the fertility of his 

 farm, and the moneyed man not to spend the principal of his 

 investments. 



For any but the merest amateur tree-culture, we must look to 

 some corporation more permanent than the life o individual man. 

 While man is a transient entity, the state, the town and other politi- 

 cal corporations are permanent. A hundred years, that outspans 

 the nearly universal human term, is but a decade in the longer life 

 of a country, a state, a town. 



It is to these corporations that we must turn for aid in all that is 

 sought to be done for the welfare of the people as a whole, for the 

 benefit of posterity. 



While it would be impossible to engage our practical people in 

 any chimerical or visionary enterprise, the nucleus and beginning of 

 a scheme of re-forestation on a small scale lies immediately within 

 our reach in a slight change of our laws regulating taxation. In 

 nearly every town in the State, more or less land, stripped of its 

 living growth by the axe or by fire, and not adapted to culture or 

 pasturage, is abandoned by the proprietor and sold at auction for 

 the taxes and charges upon it. I have appended to this paper a 

 sketch of a bill providing, that such land instead of being sold for 

 non-payment of taxes shall be forfeited to the town, and shall remain 

 permanently as municipal land, and be devoted to the growth of 

 timber and wood, under the management of the principal municipal 

 or county officers. 



To guard against excessive local taxation, the bill does not per- 

 mit anything to be expended in the care of said lands, or in planting 

 the same in excess of the income derived from them, and ten per 

 cent of the value of them raised by taxation in any one year. 



