426 United States. 



course, political appointees, and, rightly or wrongly, fell 

 under the suspicion, when proposing the sale of stump- 

 age, that they were working into the hands of lumber- 

 men. A set of well-meaning but ill-advised civic re- 

 formers succeeded, in 1893, in securing the insertion 

 into the Constitution, then being revised, of a clause 

 preventing the cutting of trees, dead or alive, on State 

 lands, declaring that they shall forever be kept as "wild 

 lands". Later, this constitutional provision was delib- 

 erately set aside by the commission, which began to 

 plant up some of the fire-wasted areas, the legislature 

 appropriating money for this breach of the Constitu- 

 tion because it was popular; and lately permission has 

 also been granted ty the legislature to remove trees from 

 burnt areas in order to reduce the fire danger the fool- 

 ish objection of a Constitution notwithstanding. 



In 1897, new legislation was passed to authorize the 

 State to purchase additional forest lands within a pre- 

 scribed limit, to round off the State's holdings, a special 

 agency, the Forest Preserve Board, being constituted for 

 that purpose. Under this law, some $3,500,000 have 

 been spent, and by 1907, over one and a half million acres 

 had been added to the State Forest Preserve. This large 

 area is withdrawn from rational economic use, reserved 

 for a pleasure ground of wealthy New Yorkers, who have 

 located their camps in the "wilderness" under the 

 avowed assumption that the State can. be forced to main- 

 tain forever this anomalous condition. 



In later years, private planting has been encouraged 

 by the Commission selling plant material from the State 

 nurseries at low rates. 



The most important administrative function of the 



