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ROOSEVELT'S PART IN FORESTRY 



By GiFFOKD PiNCHOT 



Instead of a formal article from me describing in a balanced way 

 President Roosevelt's service to forestry, will you accept this discursive 

 letter, which neither surrounds the subject nor lays measured stress 

 upon its different parts, but just talks about the man and the leader 

 whom we all loved. Just at the moment I am deep in an effort to 

 defend the Roosevelt policies as to coal, oil, and phosphate, and that 

 comes first. 



Some men belong to all people and all time. I suppose it is true that 

 Theodore Roosevelt was loved and trusted by more men and women 

 in more lands during his lifetime than any other man who ever lived. 

 Certainly more men and women followed him in spirit to the grave 

 than ever did the like before for any other man in human history. 



Very much of the work that Roosevelt started is yet unfinished. As 

 his great soul goes marching on, we know that at the very heart of the 

 goal to which it marches is that greatest of Roosevelt policies — the 

 planned and orderly development and conservation of the natural re- 

 sources of America — by no means forgetting the forest, which in a true 

 sense is the mother of all the rest. 



No matter how or where you touched him, you could not long delay 

 in finding that Roosevelt was an outdoor man. Gifted in the highest 

 degree wnth the forester's master qualities of hardiness, judgment, self- 

 control, and the power of observation, Roosevelt brought with him to 

 the White House so deep a sympathy with the foresters' viewpoint that 

 it gave color and direction to all he did touching the great central 

 problem of conservation. 



There was no forester but would have liked to have him on the hard- 

 est of his trips. There was no time when his mind was not alert for 

 the protection and advancement of the forests. His sympathy with 

 foresters as such was well shown when he broke all Presidential prece- 

 dents to attend, at a private house, a meeting of the Society of Amer- 

 ican Foresters, to address its members and to meet them all personally. 



Roosevelt's sympathy with forests and his genius for administration 

 made him from the first an active and powerful supporter of the pro- 

 posal to transfer the National Forests from the General Land Office to 

 the old Bureau of Forestry, and thus to unite the forest work of the 

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