GREENUP, CARTER, BOYD AND LAWRENCE COUNTIES. 7 
It may be urged in addition that the best interests of this 
valley demand that the streams, even to their second and third 
branching, should be used as a means of bringing out the min- 
eral and timber stores. This will require the extensive use 
of locks and dams; and these structures, already difficult to 
construct on account of the violence of the floods, would be- 
come quite impossible if their force is increased, as it will be by 
the destruction of the forests. The mineral region of Eastern 
Kentucky has a precious heritage in its forests, ores, and coals. 
All the skill of legislation, and all the discretion of private 
enterprise, should be directed to securing the best products 
from these resources, avoiding destructive waste. This cannot 
be done except by preserving the forests without great reduc- 
tion from their present area. If the State, or the counties 
thereof, still own large tracts of forest timber, it would be | 
clearly in the line of true policy to retain those areas as public 
domains in the interest of coming generations. Throughout 
Switzerland and other parts of Europe the communal forests, 
rarely large in area, are the most precious of the public do- 
mains. From them the citizens derive in many cases sums so 
large as to form a considerable element in their private rev- 
enues. Every county in our mountain districts that will put 
aside as public land ten thousand acres of forest, worth to-day 
as many dollars, will, at the end of a century, have a princely 
domain. There is, in a word, no gift that the present genera- 
tion can make to the future so precious and so noble as un- 
touched areas of our magnificent forests. For us it requires 
little forbearance to spare what will be to them a most precious 
heritage. 
IN: 5. SHAE, 
