THE FOREST AND THE STREAM. 



LETTER FROM HON. JAMES WILSON, SECRETARY 



OF AGRICULTURE, READ BEFORE THE 



NATIONAL IRRIGATION CONGRESS 



AT CHICAGO. 



Pressure of official duties prevents my presence at your Congress, 

 and I am. exceedingly sorry. It would give me great pleasure to meet 

 you, and to discuss the two great agricultural problems of the West 

 wood and water. But the work of preparing my annual report keeps 

 me in Washington, where I hope I shall not be less useful to your 

 cause than I should be if I came to Chicago. 



The Department will be represented by several of its scientists, 

 and to what they will have to say I invite your special attention. 

 Through its search for economic plants that will thrive with little 

 water, through its studies in the use of water for plants that need 

 more, through its soil investigation, its forest work, and in many other 

 ways, the Department of Agriculture is working at the problems 

 which you are met to consider. These problems are national in their 

 scope, and it is most fitting that they should be studied by the agen- 

 cies of the National government. 



The water and forest problems are essentially and primarily ones 

 o? conservation and use. The waste of water in floods and the waste 

 of forests by fire are parallel losses, each contrary to the best interests 

 of the nation at large, and each preventable by well-known means. 

 "Save the Forests and Store the Floods" is an appropriate motto for 

 your Congress. 



The vast developments which you are planning can become per- 

 manent only by the junction of wise conservation with energy; and the 

 natural resources, which have cost you nothing, must be protected 

 and husbanded with the same trained care which you are making 

 ready to bestow upon vast systems of artificial works for irrigation. 



The chief dangers which threaten your plans one the failure to 

 secure the building of these great works, the other the failure to pro- 

 tect the forests from which your waters come are best met, like most 

 of the dangers which threaten our country, by the broad diffusion of 

 wise principles and ways of thought among the people. The two sis- 

 ter organizations which are striving for the objects you have in view, 

 The National Irrigation Association and the American Forestry Asso- 



