STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 53 



cannot afford to let any piece of land loaf over there, or any- 

 body loaf over there. These public forests are extremely in- 

 teresting to everybody. You have heard, of course, always 

 about these public forests, but one of the things that has im- 

 pressed me is not so much the technical management of the 

 forest as the political aspect of the thing. The forests are 

 owned by the towns in which they exist. The little town in 

 which my mother was born and which I have visited has several 

 hundred acres of public forest. It is managed by a professional 

 forester, and the crop is cut whenever it is matured, and what 

 we call the waste here, the rubbish or brush is taken out, 

 wrapped up into bundles and is distributed pro rata through 

 the town, and the lumber is sold and the proceeds are returned 

 to the town, and there is money enough brought in from the 

 public forest owned by the town to pay all the town's bills, 

 every cent of running expenses, the care of their roads, the 

 care of their schools, and even the salary of their preacher who 

 gets a good salary from the town, the best salary in the town. 

 There are not any town taxes at all. Here in this country we 

 say a man can escape anything but death and taxes ; in that 

 country he can escape taxes, and he only dies once. There are 

 towns in that country, they tell me, where from the thrifty man- 

 agement of their own property they not only pay all their run- 

 ning expenses, but they have money left over and on the first 

 day of Januaiy they distribute $io apiece to every man, woman 

 and child in the place, making him a present for living there. I 

 don't know any place in this country where they are liable to 

 do that. We do not manage towns and cities that way. It 

 looks like good business. I know there are a good many thou- 

 sands of acres of land in Maine, as there are in Massachusetts, 

 which could be put to work if we had the brains to do it and 

 if we had the political integrity and the political efficiency to 

 manage those things as public enterprises in the way they are 

 managed in the old coimtry. 



Now friends, I have covered the trip as far as I expected to 

 go. I have taken these various ideas from various parts of the 

 country, not in a very connected manner, but I hope some of 

 them have interested you and I hope some of them seem to 

 have some bearing or other upon our problems here in Maine 

 and in New England. 



I thank you for your kind attention. 



