

JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



Vol.. XVIII MARCH, 1920 No. 3 



The Society is not responsible,- as a body, for the facts and opinions advanced 

 in the papers published by it. 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGES 



Prophecy is an attractive but oftentimes dangerous undertaking. 

 Nevertheless, there seems good reason to hold that the retirement of 

 Henry S. Graves from the leadership of the Forest Service will be 

 looked upon in future years as having marked something like the end 

 of an epoch in the history of American forestry. 



It is not merely that he was one of the very small group who in the 

 last decade of the nineteenth century, after seeking their professional 

 training abroad because no school of forestry had then been estab- 

 lished in the United States, became the path-breakers for the great 

 advance made in the first years of the twentieth, and that of those 

 pioneers, with a single exception, all the rest have already passed out of 

 the employ of the Go-vernment. Pinchot, Price, Olmsted, Griffith — 

 and now Graves; to say nothing of such other veterans of the Service 

 as W. L. Hall, Bruce, Kellogg, DuBois, E. T. Allen, C. S. Chapman, 

 and others. Fortunately, of the contemporaries of these latter men a 

 fair sprinkling still remains — and so also do the ideals and traditions, 

 as well as the principles and established practice, which through trans- 

 mittal guarantee continuity. The Forest Service will carry on ; and it 

 gains in stability through demonstration of its capacity to develop its 

 own leadership. Nevertheless, it is probable that a turning point has 

 been reached ; that the chapter in the history of American forestry 

 which opened with Mr. Pinchot's appointment as Forester in 1898 

 closes with Colonel Graves' retirement in 1020. 



Two great achievements take up most of that chapter — the inception 

 and firm establisiimcnt of the public forest enterprise, and the develop- 

 ment of a decisive, clear-cut public sentiment for forestry. These 

 two achievements were interlocked ; each furthered the other, and 

 neither could have been realized by itself. For in a democracy the 

 only guarantee of permanence that a public undertaking can have is 



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