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grass land and brush land ei:oept in Southern California, is 

 all with one idea in mind -to insure the protection from 

 fire of the public owned Forest producing lands for which we 

 are responsible. Probably five times the money could be de- 

 voted to this purpose if we abandoned all our outposts of 

 protection and concentrated on true Forest land'.! in Govern- 

 ment ownership. But I firmly believe that we can not do 

 this until we convince the public that all fires everywhere 

 are public calamities to be stamped out at once. Tftien the 

 public thinlcs this way private and State agencies will assume 

 their share of the burden, but until they do we must do it 

 and this e:rbra protection is a perfectly' legitimate charge 

 against the safeguarding of the Forest producing lands that 

 the people hire us to protect, 



T7e will go further into the statistics of the 

 firo season later on. Just here what I want to point out 

 is that we are getting fire protection down to a business 

 and are beginning to linow that business. We have studied 

 carefully our past experiences , recorded and analyzed each 

 season 1 s results, and experimented in an intelligent way 

 until we have laid the foundation of a real science of fire 

 protection. Three seasons ago lookouts were an experiment, 

 jfifow they a:ro an essential part of our system. T7e have master- 

 ed the. first principles of telephony or enough to develop 

 OTO.' ootannmicatiQX* systems to a point of high efficiency. We 



. are wording tfSfc- along the right lines other methods of com- 



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rnunication. There has been a vast improvement in the last 

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