64 Vermont Agricultural Report. 



laws that are on the statute books of every State, it would not be 

 difficult to get rid of this bugbear. 



Your own law, recognizing only wilful and malicious incen- 

 diarism and overlooking negligence, is left to execute itself as 

 in most other States and hence remains a dead letter. To stop 

 the nuisance a regular organized active effort is necessary, such 

 as is now made in at least three or four States in imitation of 

 the first example given by New York. 



The damage done by forest fires in your State may appear 

 to be relatively small because your woods are largely hardwoods. 

 Nevertheless, wherever fire. runs over the ground, not only are 

 the seedlings, the aftergrowth, the promise of the future, doomed 

 but, the litter being burned to ashes, soil conditions are impover- 

 ished. As long as such conditions exist, as long as at any time 

 and with practically no redress, the crop of many years may be 

 wiped out of existence, is there any inducement to enter upon a 

 conservative forest management for private owners or for the 

 State either? 



A single experience of the discouragement which such a 

 state of affairs produces may suffice to make you realize its mean- 

 ing. A large operator in New Hampshire having been induced 

 to treat his large holdings of spruce conservatively had cut over 

 100,000 acres or so with a diameter limitation. A fire wiped out 

 of existence all he had left, and the forestry cause has one ad- 

 vocate less. 



Hence I formulate the eighth and last fundamental, as self 

 evident as I consider all the others to be : 



No forestry, i. e., conservative forest management for con- 

 tinuous zvood production, is practicable until forest property is at 

 least as safe from destruction by fire as other common property. 

 Until the morals of the public are educated and the capacity of 

 the government developed to the extent of coping with this evil, 

 the public must blame itself and not the lumbermen or other ex- 

 ploiters of the forest for malpractice in the use of this property. 



Your first move, therefore, should be to secure the sine 

 qua non, — safety of forest property, without which it is idle to 

 talk of forest preservation, conservative lumbering or forestry. 



I feel that by this discussion of first principles and self evi- 

 dent truths I have but little aided you in a practical solution of 

 your problem. I might perhaps have done better to discuss the 

 definite measures and steps by which such a solution may be 

 reached. 



But for such a discussion I can refer you to an address de- 

 livered at a similar occasion, namely before the Massachusetts 

 Board of Agriculture, printed in their Proceedings for the last 

 year, in which I have very fully elaborated on the various meth- 



