326 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



better adapted to permanent forest culture than to any other 

 use to which it could be devoted. 



The question in this state today — and the people of the en- 

 tire country are going to see it in a few years — is a question not 

 of one little reserve up here in northern Minnesota being pre- 

 served, it is- a question of planting" many millions of acres of 

 new forest to be harvested from year to year, beginning as soon 

 as it is grown to maturity, in order to supply the enormous and 

 increasing demand for lumber that is going on by reason of the 

 rapid development of our country. Instead of trying to get 

 forest reserves in Minnesota opened, the thing to do is to get 

 some more of them created and planted. (Applause.) You 

 do riot need to put them all in one place, you do not need to 

 put them all around one town ; let them be divided here and 

 there among many places, because that is the only way to pre- 

 serve the lumber industry. 



The forest question in this state has a different aspect than 

 it has in the country whence I come. You can cut off a forest 

 in Minnesota, and if the land goes back to a desert after a few 

 years of cultivation it only affects one community, and a com- 

 munity not commercially connected with it might not be affect- 

 ed by it to any great extent. On the other hand, I come from a 

 state where, over a great area of that state, absolute destruc- 

 tion will follow of all interests if the trees on the mountains 

 which conserve the water supply for irrigation are destroyed. 

 We have in California trees that were great trees when 

 Christ was on earth, and there is a romantic reason for pre- 

 serving them which is entirely separate and apart from com- 

 merce and agriculture. With you the question of tree plant- 

 ing is a question which should be treated with a cool, calm, dis- 

 passionate and unprejudiced mind, as it involves one of the 

 great industrial problems of your state. 



I want to point out to you the unwisdom of reclaiming some 

 of your sandy lands by drainage in the ordinary way. If you 

 put in a system of open ditches in that country, as they are doing 

 in parts of Minnesota today, and as they are doing in a great 

 many places in the Mississippi valley today in draining swamps 

 into the river, what will be the result? If you drain the sandy 

 land out in that way, lower the water table down as far as you 

 would probably have to do to drain those overflowed lands and 

 turn them into farms, you may lower the water table to a pomt 

 where you have nothing but the surface fertility to depend on. 



