164 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



ment the other half. This plan, I am informed, has worked admirably 

 for the last two or three years, and the lumbermen have urged the govern- 

 ment to increase the number of fire patrols. This is a feature which you 

 should also include in your forestry laws. If you can devise practicable 

 and effective forest fire legislation you will have the lumbermen on your 

 side. That is the beginning of forestry— to stop destruction, and not to 

 stop lumber cutting. If nothing more were done than to stop the un- 

 necessary waste, it would be sufiBcient for the present. 



Now I wish to speak about the general government. I think, of all the 

 foolish, unbusiness-like methods in which our government abounds, there 

 are none that will compare with the management of the public timber land. 

 These lands represented one of the most valuable of public properties, but 

 they have dwindled away until now there is only a small part left, and this 

 part is being robbed right and left; and the government has never had any 

 .equivalent for the value destroyed. This is your timber land and you are 

 the owners that are being robbed by lack of proper legislation. To get 

 rid of the timber, to let it be stolen or be burned up, has been the policy. 

 Within the last two years we have been successful— and that is, perhaps, 

 the only success that the forestry people can boast of— in changing this 

 policy, by the introduction of a clause in a bad law — this clause is the good 

 part — allowing the president to reserve public timber-lands for forest res- 

 ervations whenever he sees fit. This law will stand in the history of the 

 United States as one of the wisest laws ever made regarding economic 

 legislation. 



Most of the forest property of the United States lies west of the Rocky 

 Mountains, where in order to carry on agriculture it is necessary to have 

 irrigating ditches, and the people there have begun to wake up to the 

 fact that the forest is a storehouse for water that is better than any arti- 

 ficial one they can construct. Therefore, this law was enacted, in addition 

 to all other irrigation laws, to help the farming interests of the West. 

 Under this law, the president has made now some thirteen reservations 

 in various parts of the country, comprising ail together some eleven million 

 acres of land. In addition to that, there are various national parks, as 

 you know, and to those there have been others added. In addition to 

 that, you have now in this state a donation of forty thousand acres to the 

 state of Minnesota by the United States, the Itasca Park, which was 

 ceded to you for park purposes. 



Now, I want to have you keep in mind that these parks are not what 

 the Forestry Association is after. These parks are not the same thing 

 as the forest reservations we are asking for. They are something entirely 

 different, and the people in Minnesota have been mixing up these two 

 things, greatly to the detriment of both. A park is set aside for the 

 purpose of preserving the scenery and the natural objects of interest, 

 the game and fish and other things, for the recreation of tourists or 

 visitors, or for health-giving conditions or purposes of similar nature. 

 The forest reservations have an entire different object in view. They 

 are to be made for the purpose of utilizing the timber and any other 

 resources in the same in a rational manner, instead of the irrational use 

 to which these lands at present are subjected. If it were only known to 

 the people in your state, that when we ask in Minnesota for a reserve 

 of five million acres in the northern part of the-state for forest purposes 



