148 



Notwithstanding the magnitude of the subject to which you are preparing to address 

 yourselves, I feel confident that through your deliberations measures will be initiated 

 "which will be of inestimable value to the health, wealth and prosperity of all the people 

 of this country, and will mark an epoch in its economic history that will be remembered 

 "with pleasure in all the future, and I doubt not that the coming Ohio man will proudly 

 and gratefully call attention to the fact that the American Forestry Congress distinguished 

 his State by holding its first session in its largest city, and through its deliberations there- 

 in, were evolved and moulded into practical form great scientific truths upon the subject 

 of Forestry, that resulted in great good to all of the people of the Republic. 



The Committee on Constitution and By-laws presented their report, which was 

 adopted. The Hon. George B. Loring, United States Commissioner of Agriculture, was 

 unanimously elected President, and on rising to deliver his address, was enthusiastically 

 cheered. 



President Loring's Address. 



Gentlemen, — I have accepted your invitation to be pi-esent on this occasion and to 

 preside over your deliberations, not because I feel competent to instruct in the art of 

 forestry, but in order that I might assure you of the sympathy of the Agricultural De- 

 partment of the Government, and of my own high estimate of the value of your wort. 

 The question of forestry is one of the most intricate aud difficult of all the agricultural 

 problems which come before us. 



That our forests are wasted by reckless extravagance and by uncontrollable confla- 

 grations ; that they are diminishing before the immense demands upon their products, 

 we all know. Their importance as a climatic influence is conceded. The profit of tree- 

 growing on wisely selected lands is acknowledged. But the methods by which our forests 

 can be restored and preserved still puzzle the statesman and the cultivator alike. The 

 nature of property in timber lands as adjusted for the State and the individual, in all 

 those countries where the forests have attracted the special attention of the Government, 

 particularly in the Old World, has so much of exclusiveness and reservation for the grati- 

 fication of personal desires, that we can derive but little benefit from its study. The 

 rights and powers and duties of State and Federal legislation, as regards our forests, re- 

 quire the most careful and ingenious consideration. We learn from the statistical re- 

 turns the vast value of forest products to our commerce, to our domestic manufactures, 

 to our internal trade. And by constant investigation we are ascei'taining the best f^ys- 

 tems of tree-planting, and of cultivating specific wood crops in favorable localities. You 

 will pardon me, therefore, while I leave all these difficult, practical problems for the con- 

 sideration of those who have brought here the results of long study and experience, and. 

 turn my attention to the value and 



Importance of Tree Culture 



as one of those arts by which man beautifies his abode, and manifests that taste which 

 especially distinguishes him in the scale of animate being, and which he labors to gratify 

 as soon as he has laid the hard and substantial foundations of State and Society. Men 

 build first, and then plant. The primary work of erecting an empire, in which all the 

 sturdy virtues are called into operation, and where courage fixes the national power, and 

 wisdom establishes the national education, is not a field for the exei'cise of man's love of 

 beauty. With the wars and the felling of the forests, and the log cabin and primitive 

 school-house of a newly-settled country and a newly-founded empire, taste has but little 

 to do. But when safety and property are made secure, and the highways are well worn, 

 and the skill and strength of the cultivator have stripped the landscape of its natural 

 beauty, and the foot of man has trampled out the grac(?ful lines in which Nature always 

 Avorks, then there uprises man's demand for the beautiful, and he endeavors to restore by 

 art what he was obliged to destroy for his subsistence. For whatever may be his out- 

 ward circumstance, however hardening and depressing may be the incidents of his life, 

 man has an instinctive love of beauty, which insists on being gratified. He knows that 

 this is his distinguishing characteristic which separates him from the beasts that perish — 

 an element of his mind and heart which leads him "from nature up to nature's God." 



