EDITORIAL 53 



A STATE'S UPBUILDING 



LEADING article this month calls attention to the noteworthy devel- 

 opment of forestry in New Hampshire, to which reference was made in 

 our September issue, in connection with the meeting of the Society for the 

 Protection of New Hampshire Forests. So marked has been this progress 

 that it might almost be described as regeneration. More than forty years ago 

 when everyone regarded our forests as inexhaustible and hardly anyone had 

 begun to appreciate their protective and sanative values, the Granite State 

 parted with the last of its mountain lands. At that time this was quite 

 natural. Today it would be regarded as a crime. So far have we advanced 

 in knowledge and lost in forest wealth. 



Like most of the older and especially of the agricultural states, New 

 Hampshire was slow to realize the consequence of its error and slower still 

 to adopt a new policy. It happened also that there grew up within the state 

 a type of politics which did not always serve the people well and which afifected 

 forestry and agriculture as well as all other interests of the state. Everything 

 was dominated by the railroads and strange results followed. 



The last few years have seen a change, striking and encouraging the 

 revolt against the railroad empire, as Mr. Churchill has named it, the struggle 

 of good citizenship to assert itself, and a consequent revolution in many of the 

 little strongholds of the old system. A very active part in this development 

 has been played by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. 

 It is and has been wholly outside of politics, but its vigorous work has been 

 on the side of good citizenship and of more intelligent and unselfish adminis- 

 tration of the state's affairs. Through the men whose personal influence re- 

 ceives due credit in Mr. Brown's narrative, the forestry commission became 

 vitalized into a big, aggressive force. Its leading member won his spurs in 

 the commission and in the legislature and has been duly promoted to the 

 governorship, and today the forestry movement is nowhere more active than 

 in this old conservative commonwealth. It is suggestive to note through all 

 this the intimate relationship between forestry and good citizenship. 



It is a splendid record that the people of New Hampshire are making and 

 they can no longer be charged with backwardness in this direction. With the 

 national forests that must come in the ^Yhite Mountains as a nucleus, we now 

 look hopefully forward to seeing the state build around this a system of state 

 forests and forests and mountain parks which will be objects of interested 

 study by foresters and civic improvement advocates everywhere. 



A SUGGESTION FOR FULLER STATISTICS 



[OME months ago there was started on its round of misrepresentation 

 one of those statements of fact which is so much more injurious than a 

 falsehood. It was in the form of a table showing the total acreage of the 

 states of California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington, the 

 ''reserved acreage" (by which is meant the national forests) in each, and the 

 percentage of the latter to the former, showing an average reservation in the 

 six states of 26.9 per cent. This was used by the diligent newspaper oppo- 

 nents of the national forest system as a text for their attacks on that system, 

 and it crops out from time to time in other journals farther east, being 

 used to show that "conservation" is detrimental to the prosperity and civiliza- 

 tion of the national forest states. 



For example, a leading paper in Michigan took it up and pointed out that 

 a proportionate reserved area in Michigan would amount to ten million acres 



