ADDRESSES OF MAJOR LACEY 93 



it is not news to you, and yet it is worthy of record here, 

 that this measure had passed the House of Representa- 

 tives and is now pending in the Senate of the United 

 States ; and your judgment and influence will go far, no 

 doubt, to secure its passage through that wise and great 

 though somewhat slow-moving body. We have at the 

 head of the Department of Agriculture the great head of 

 forestry. I, perhaps, do not mean the gentlemen that you 

 are all thinking of. It is not my dear young friend, Mr. 

 Pinchot, but the old man, who comes from the prairie 

 state of Iowa, a state whose chief forests consisted of 

 hazel brush in the days when the secretary of agriculture 

 first settled in his magnificent domain. And I might say 

 to you that so far as the state is concerned, it is quite 

 too rich to use much of it for forestry. They can hardly 

 afford it. With the land at one hundred dollars an acre, 

 to plant out in trees, the crop of which will be harvested 

 seventy-five years from now, is almost too expensive even 

 for a nation to undertake, so Iowa will never be a forest 

 producing state. The head of this department will be 

 succeeded some day — I hope a long time in the future — 

 by some man of equally comprehensive grasp and an 

 equally prophetic view of the future. The department 

 has come to stay, and it is a department that may look far 

 into the future and do that for the nation and for the 

 people which the private individual, or even the state, is 

 not adequate to accomplish. And, therefore, it is well 

 that when these reservations have finally been delimited 

 and their outlines fixed, that they should be transferred, 

 not to a department whose business it is to pass the title 

 away to individuals but to a department that will hold 

 on to this land, that will turn it over to succeeding admin- 

 istrations, and that will preserve the sources of the water 

 supply of the country in the West, whose future is entire- 

 ly dependent upon the successful operation of irrigation. 



