1885.] THE DESTRUCTION OF CANADIAN FORESTS. 233 



profitable for private as well as public enterprise. The forests of 

 Manitoba and the Xorth-West, now being slaslied and wasted with 

 great recklessness, should be kept as permanent reserves to supply 

 the wants of settlers, the mature trees only being cut down. 

 Millions of fine young trees are now being cut down, and their 

 branches left to litter the ground, acting as conductors for the 

 prairie fires. All the present forest land should be carefully sur- 

 veyed, laid out in districts and charted, and the character and 

 profile of the land described. Timber experts or competent wood- 

 rangers should be sent to examine, appraise, and report on their 

 value and availability. Enough has been shown, ]\Ir. Morgan 

 believes, to make it evident that it is the duty of the Government 

 to adopt immediate measures to arrest the further destruction of 

 remaining forests, except under some very improved system of 

 supervision to replant, where practicable, the high lands formerly 

 covered with forest trees, and to adopt some system of forest plan- 

 tation for the great prairie region in our North-West. Of the great 

 necessity for this there is no doubt, of the probability of success 

 there can be none. The chief forester of the N'orthern Pacific 

 Eailway says : — " The fact that within the last ten years hundreds 

 of groves, containing millions of healthy, vigorous young trees, are 

 now growing far out in the treeless region, where science had pre- 

 ordained and deemed the work an impossibility, must be acknow- 

 ledged. The fact that young groves of forest trees are now being 

 successfully grown on the line of the Northern Pacific Railway, 

 away out beyond the 100th meridian, has also got to be admitted, 

 science and its votaries to the contrary notwithstanding." 



In most of the States, the failure of laws (whether for protection 

 of forests or encouragement of arboriculture) to attain the desired 

 result, has been not so much the fault of the laws as the absence of 

 persons to see that they were properly enforced. In any system,, 

 the Government of the Dominion should, without loss of time,, 

 appoint a Forest Commission to co-operate with a similar Commission 

 from every province in the Dominion, to deal with this all-important 

 question of the protection of the old and the reproduction of new 

 forests. 



