104 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



to property rights, that is, the responsibility of the private land owner 

 to use his property so as to prevent a general economic injury. I 

 believe that this principle is sound and that it must be recognized in any 

 effective forestry program. But it is a departure from our past con- 

 ceptions of individual rights in relation to public interests, and a de- 

 parture which affects directly the existing and long-standing interests 

 of hundreds of thousands of our citizens. Recognizing this fact, I 

 believe that we should democratize the application of the principle and 

 the ways and means of enforcing it as far as possible. We will get 

 farther in the long run if we work for the adoption of this principle 

 by and under the authority of our local forms of government and for 

 its application through local administrative means, in which the people 

 who are affected can be duly represented and whose policies they can 

 influence as voters in their own State or community. In my judgment, 

 this is the effective answer to the assertion that the proposal might 

 become an arbitrary and confiscatory invasion of property rights. 



It can be said, on the other side, that Federal machinery will afford 

 the most uniform and effective enforcement of legislation of this char- 

 acter. Against that I, for one, would bank on the value of a real 

 democratization of the idea, of the greater gain in the long run of 

 developing local support for it, of making its application representative 

 of local public sentiment and of the local interests which are affected. 

 This is the American way of working such things out ; and particularly 

 in promoting a change in our national conceptions of individual respon- 

 sibility of this character, I feel that we will get farther by beginning 

 at the bottom instead of at the top. Instead of attempting to force this 

 principle on the forest owners of the United States by Federal law and 

 Federal machinery, will we not actually get more tangible results, more 

 forest growth, by working it out State by State or section by section 

 through their local agencies? 



To recognize the States as the proper agency to deal with private 

 lands within their borders in no way implies that the Federal Govern- 

 ment should surrender its own proper and necessary fimctions in con- 

 serving our national resources. The continued Federal administration 

 of public lands and the extension of National Forests are not involved 

 in a program which seeks to arrest the devastation of private holdings 

 through an extension of the police fimctions already exercised by the 

 States over them. 



The cliinination of farm woodlots. I can see no justification for 

 eliminating farm woodlots from the application of any forestry pro- 

 gram. Unimproved farm lands, reported as aggregating 190,000,000 

 acres in the census of 1910, constitute a very important part of our 



