COMMENT. 



After a long- and persistent struggle through several years the 

 measure to establish forest reservations in the eastern states under 

 federal authority and at federal expense has become a fact. What 

 a change of heart and of principles in government policy has been 

 wrought in the last two decades ! In 1890, we were still strug- 

 gling to convert the land policy of the United States to a saner 

 attitude with reference to the timberlands. We were then told 

 that it was entirely contrary to the spirit of American institutions 

 for the federal government to own lands, except for disposal, 

 that it would be entirely incompetent and improper for it to man- 

 age any of its own lands for continuity. At that time any one 

 who would have suggested that the government might buy lands 

 for the purpose of management would surely have been desig- 

 nated as fit for the lunatic asylum. At that time — it was during 

 President Cleveland's first administration — even co-operation on 

 experimental lines with a state institution was frowned upon as 

 undemocratic. These were, indeed, "road breaking" times ! 

 Those of a later generation who have reaped the results of these 

 €arly struggles have little idea of the discouragements which 

 beset the forest reformer of those days. 



It should never be forgotten that to John W. Noble, Secretary 

 of Interior, under President Harrison, (and to those who edu- 

 cated him up to it), belongs the credit of having first recognized 

 the need and having taken the first practical step towards a change 

 of the land policy of the United States, when he insisted in con- 

 ference committee at the last hour of Congress upon the insertion 

 into the law of the clause empowering the president to set aside 

 forest reservations. 



That these reservations must be specially managed was then 

 still a matter, which needed years of educational effort to make 

 clear. Meanwhile, through the inconsiderate action of President 

 Cleveland upon the representations of the Academy of Science, in 

 doubling with one stroke the area of the reservations without any 

 provision for their use, the whole reservation policy was very 

 nearly abolished and the hard-earned beginnings lost. President 



