152 PRINCIPLES OF AMERICAN FORESTRY. 



The Prevention of Forest Fires will be most certainly 

 accomplished by educating our people to an appreciation 

 of the amount of damage done by them. In some sections 

 it is impossible to enforce the law against setting forest 

 fires, owing to the belief that fires are a good thing for 

 their sections in destroying tree-growth and bringing 

 the land into condition to be easily taken up by settlers. 

 There is some truth in this claim, but since the fires de- 

 stroy all increase on the land they sweep over, a large 

 amount of it is thereby rendered entirely unproductive 

 long before settlers are ready for it, while in the mean- 

 time it might be producing a crop of valuable timber. 

 Then again, it is the greatest injustice to allow one per- 

 son to burn the property of another, which right is practi- 

 cally claimed by those who advocate the unrestricted 

 use of fire. 



With a Desire in the Minds of People to keep out forest 

 fires, there are many precautions that could be taken 

 that would lessen the chances of their starting, and when 

 started would aid in controlling them. The first thing is 

 a good fire law, such as now stands in Minnesota, which 

 recognizes the fact that the State and county should 

 protect forest property from fire for the same reason that 

 a town or city protects the property of its citizens from 

 fire. This law puts two-thirds the expense of enforcing 

 it on the State and the other one-third on the county. 

 The chief reasons why a part of this burden should be 

 borne by the State and not by the counties alone are that 

 fires spread from one county to another, and the State 

 must be organized to extinguish such fires when they 

 have once started, since it is the only competent author- 

 ity that can do this. Then again, the Stats of Minnesota 

 owns, or will own, when surveys have been completed, 

 about 3,000,000 acres of land scattered through the for- 

 ested area, besides possibly nearly as great an area that 



