748 A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 



which they would be connected with it, and the fact that they had no personal 

 interest at stake in it except their salaries. 



His plan therefore proposed that, instead of the Government's at- 

 tempting to conduct the experiment directly, public aid should be 

 extended to a private corporation to be created as a research agency. 



In "Man and Nature", published in 1864, Marsh had said: 



It is much to be feared that [public ownership and management] would be 

 inadequate to save the forests of the American Union. There is little respect 

 for public property in America, and the Federal Government, certainly, would 

 not be the proper agent of the Nation for this purpose. It proved itself unable 

 to protect the liveoak woods of Florida, which were intended to be preserved for 

 the use of the Navy; and it more than once paid contractors a high price for 

 timber stolen from its own forests. The authorities of the individual States 

 might be more efficient. 



If any evidence is needed of the debauched standard of political 

 life in the era of the seventies, a single citation from the proceedings 

 of Congress will provide it. A few weeks after the House of Rep- 

 resentatives received the Colorado memorial one of its members, 

 George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, stood before the Senate as one of 

 the House managers of the impeachment trial of the Secretary of War. 

 In addressing that body, then sitting as a court, he said : 



My own public life has been a very brief and insignificant one, extending little 

 beyond the duration of a single term of senatorial office. But in that brief period 

 I have seen five judges of a high court of the United States driven from office by 

 threats of impeachment for corruption or maladministration. I have heard the 

 taunt, from friendliest lips, that when the United States presented herself in 

 the East to take part with the civilized world in generous competition in the arts 

 of life, the only product of her institutions in which she surpassed all others be- 

 yond question was her corruption. * * * When the greatest railroad of the 

 world, binding together the continent and uniting the two great seas which wash 

 our shores, was finished, I have seen our national triumph and exultation turned 

 to bitterness and shame by the unanimous reports of three committees of Con- 

 gress two of the House and one here that every step of that mighty enterprise 

 had been taken in fraud. I have heard in highest places the shameless doctrine 

 avowed by men grown old in public office that the true way by which power should 

 be gained in the Republic is to bribe the people with the offices created for their 

 service, and the true end for which it should be used when gained is the promo- 

 tion of personal ambition and the gratification of personal revenge. 



The American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 

 taking action to make known to Congress its recommendations that 

 a Federal agency should be set up to promote practices of timber 

 growing throughout the United States, did not contemplate an organ- 

 ization charged with duties of administration. The association acted 

 after, and presumably was induced to act by, the presentation of 

 a paper "On the Duty of Governments in the Preservation of For- 

 ests." Although this paper pointed out that the questions involved 

 "are not limited to a particular State, but interest the Nation gen- 

 erally," the action proposed for the association was that it should bring 

 the subject of protection of the forests, and their cultivation, regula- 

 tion, and encouragement, "to the notice of our several State govern- 

 ments, and Congress with respect to the Territories." The com- 

 mittee of the association which drafted a memorial to Congress 

 seems to have sought the creation of an independent commission of 

 forestry headed by a commissioner with a function paralleling that 

 of the Commissioner of Agriculture and the Commissioner of Fish- 

 eries. What was contemplated and shortly brought to pass, in other 

 words, was the setting up of a central clearing house of information 



