82 Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



who swept their backs with the lash of insolence. In England men once 

 prized the scant right to reap with peasant's billhook or shepherd's 

 crook as high as they could reach among the dead branches of the trees. 

 Soon you will perhaps fight among your kind and kin for the right to 

 glean in another man's forest by hook or crook you, who but now 

 owned the widest and richest forests in the world. Do you care ? 



In Europe one may no't fell a tree without paying, without asking. 

 As Americans, we laugh at such restrictions. We are fools. Do you 

 care? We call this the land of the free. It is not such now. We 

 boasted of our land of opportunity open to all the world, but oppor- 

 tunity has been taken from the average man. Do you object? 



Do you think such statements as these sensational, brutal, coarse? 

 My brother, what pen shall be so bitter and abominable as shall make 

 you writhe and say, ' ' This is not true, ' ' and then make you look around 

 and find that it all is true, and more is true ? 



When we first owned this country, one half of its total area was 

 covered with the grandest forests that ever grew in any portion of the 

 world the richest, the most useful, the most valuable for the building 

 of a civilization. Yes, we had trees. We had forests that set the first 

 writers who saw this county w f ild w r ith admiration, men who came here 

 from reforested Europe. They were all ours. Now they are gone. 

 Are they reared in lasting structures of a great civilization? No; at 

 least one half of them are ashes or rotted mould. Half of what we have 

 left to-day also will be ashes or rotted mould. They will never rest in 

 the beams and walls of abiding homes. 



Had we gone on across this continent and left the remnants of our 

 standing woods, we still should have abundance ; but we have gone back 

 a second and a third time, gleaning more exactly each little bit of wood, 

 until we have reaped our forests as sheep reap the grass lands, leaving 

 nothing behind to grow. We have used ever-increasing appliances for 

 speed and thoroughness, to supply an ever-increasing demand, at all 

 ever-increasing price. We are converging in ever-increasing numbers, 

 with an ever-increasing zeal, upon what is left ; and in our haste to get 

 it all, we are permitting an ever-increasing waste and ruin of the original 

 supply. 



Our very classification shows how sweeping has been the devastation. 

 We now classify as "pine" all sorts of pine Norway pine, Jack pine, 

 pitch pine although we know that true white pine, once the only weed 

 dignified with the name, is, as a great lumber tree, practically an 

 extinct species. As to the hardwoods, twenty years ago we used only 

 oak, walnut, hickory, cherry, maple, birch; now we add cottonwood, 

 beech, sycamore, all sorts of gum trees, anything that will saw into a. 

 board. The desolation in the hardwood forests of the South is as 



