of the land annually, which is entirely possible? If they could 

 see that the present system when the land is sold and the 

 money put at interest yields but 3 per cent to 4 per cent and, 

 that the land itself remains as a worthless burden upon the 

 state, paying no taxes and producing no wealth, would they 

 persist in their old views and hang to the old law, because 

 it had been wise at the time it was made? They certainly 

 would not. 



Big Revenue the Object. 



As we have said before, in the light of what they knew, 

 they acted wisely. In the light of what they would know 

 now, we would expect them to act wisely again. Their ob- 

 ject was to produce as big a revenue as possible from the 

 lands entrusted to them and they would adopt the course 

 which would best answer their purpose now. They would 

 cease selling land which it was no longer profitable to sell 

 and start in the production of timber which has been proven 

 a profitable state investment in all of the other civilized coun- 

 tries in the world. 



The time has come when this change must be made. We 

 have three millions of acres of land in the northern part of 

 the state yet unsold. At least one million of that is non- 

 agricultural land. This land should be put to work at once 

 in the only way that such land can be made to work, by 

 changing it into state forests and planting it up to trees. 

 It is mere folly to sell it for a poor price when we know it 

 will degenerate into a desert^and produce absolutely nothing 

 in the future. Had this been done with all of the non-agri- 

 cultural land that we owned twenty years ago, the state of 

 Minnesota would be far in the lead of its neighbor states, 

 both in policy and in forest wealth. 



Modernizing the Early Law. 



It is the object of this constitutional amendment which 

 comes up before the people next November to modernize the 

 law as laid down by the makers of the constitution, to bring 

 it up to date, to make it a wise law in the light of the facts 

 as they appear today as those men would have us do. It is 



