960 JOURNAL 01' I'OKKSTRY 



or the timberland owner retains his property, he is under public 

 obligation, if not legal, not to reduce it to waste land. As classes, 

 however, farmers as well as timberland owners are under public obliga- 

 tion to continue producing crops. The farmers, indeed, have been 

 doing this for centuries, while the timber owners have been merely 

 harvesting wild crops upon the production of which they spent no 

 effort. If in individual cases timber can be grown on the land only 

 at a financial loss, one of two things must be true : either the land 

 can be put to some other use which does not involve a loss, and 

 should therefore not be considered potential forest land, or it cannot 

 be owned by the individual except at a loss, in which case it is diffi- 

 cult to see why the owner should want to keep it. Moreover, even the 

 individual farmer is not entirely free to handle his crops and orchards 

 as he imagines his own self-interest would dictate. In many States 

 there are regulations requiring spraying of fruit trees, removal of 

 host-plants carrying diseases, removal of noxious weeds, regulating 

 the handling of live stock in cases of outbreak of contagious diseases, 

 and so on. It is true that some methods of farming result in gullying 

 and consequent abandonment of land. In most cases, however, such 

 treatment is due rather to ignorance of proper methods than to wilful 

 abuse of the land. Where such devastation of agricultural land can- 

 not be prevented by education, which is now amply provided by the 

 State and Federal Governments, and where the damage done by ero- 

 sion is on a sufficiently large scale to cause public concern, then it 

 comes in the same category with devastation of timber lands, and 

 must come under State police regulations or Government control. 



Our taking of the American continent from the Indians was justi- 

 fied on the ground that we would make use of the land which they 

 were allowing to lie idle. If now the farm owners of the United 

 States should decide that there is not enough profit in growing farm 

 crops, but should undertake merely to harvest whatever crops might 

 grow wild on the land, and should at the same time use their land in 

 such a way that not even wild crops could be harvested for one or 

 more generations thereafter, how long w^ould it be before their public 

 obligation to farm the land was made a legal obligation, or the lands 

 confiscated? Yet the timberland owners, as a class, have taken a 

 course very similar to this — not because they could not grow timber 

 crops at a profit, but because they could make a greater profit by 

 harvesting wild crops in such a way as to destroy the possibility of 

 even wild future crops on much of the land. 



