256 Presidential Addresses 



You have heavy responsibilities every man that 

 does any work that is worth doing has a heavy re 

 sponsibility for upon the quality of your work the 

 development of forestry in the United States and 

 the protection of the industries which depend upon it 

 will largely rest. You have made a good beginning, 

 and I congratulate you upon it. Not only is a sound 

 national forest policy coming rapidly into being, but 

 the lumbermen of the country are proving their in 

 terest in forestry by practicing it. Twenty years ago 

 a meeting such as this to-night would have been im 

 possible, and the desires we hear expressed would 

 have been treated as having no possible relation to 

 practical life. I think, Mr. Secretary, that since you 

 first came into Congress here there has been a com 

 plete revolution in the attitude of public men to 

 ward this question. We have reached a point where 

 American foresters, trained in American forest 

 schools, are attacking American forest problems 

 with success. That is the way to meet the larger 

 work you have before you. It is a work of peculiar 

 difficulty, because precedents are lacking. It will de 

 mand training, steadiness, devotion, and above all 

 esprit de corps, fealty to the body of which you are 

 members, zeal to keep the practice as well as the 

 ideals of that body high. The more harmoniously 

 you work with each other, the better your work will 

 be. And above all a condition precedent upon your 

 usefulness to the body politic as a whole is the way 

 in which you are able both to instil your own ideals 

 into the mass of your fellowmen with whom you 



