136 AMERICAN FORESTRY 



the axe and the yet deadlier weapon, fire, the forests of the country are being 

 destroyed in a prolonged fury of sheer wastefulness, the wastefulness which 

 is one of the marks of that madness with which the gods visit alike men and 

 nations whom they wish to destroy. Much of this destruction is due to sheer 

 ignorance and heedlessness; but the end is the same and unless the people at 

 large can be awakened to a full realization of the enormous folly of such de- 

 struction, the time must come within a few generations when the forests of 

 this country will have disappeared as completely as the forests of Western 

 Euroi>e and of Eastern Asia. 



The three great enemies of forests are storms and fire and man. There 

 are others but these are the most destructive and of the three, man is easily 

 the most deadly. Attention may be called to the fact that, though one of the 

 greatest enemies in the world to forests is the storm which is always de- 

 structive and often with its besom of destruction sweeps down everything in 

 its pathway, yet this subject of forest conservation appear to have survived in 

 full vigor and health one of the most threatening and violent commotions 

 which has happened in our day, and all may rejoice that, though the lightning 

 has been continually playing around and the thunder has sometimes been 

 almost deafening; though, indeed, from time to time the forked bolts are still 

 flashing and the rolling thunder still reverberating, they are growing further 

 and further away ; the chief violence of the hurricane appears to have spent 

 itself; the atmosphere appears to be clearing and the subject of forest conser- 

 vation still survives apparently unimpaired. It is a good augury that pos- 

 sibly there are a good many who like myself steadfastly endeavored amid the 

 greatest commotion to maintain an equable frame of mind and to pursue that 

 middle course which in most things is safest, who have never felt it necessary 

 to accept the extreme view on either side, but have been glad to recognize the 

 admirable and indeed invaluable work which has been accomplished by those 

 who have so earnestly sought to preserve for the people the people of this 

 age and their posterity alike their priceless possession which without their 

 zealous advocacy would have been lost forever. 



One of the chief dangers of this extreme contention was the apparent 

 transference of all the thought and energy of the country from the general 

 subject of conservation to the particular and distant subject involved in the 

 controversy, and the advocates of conservation may felicitate themselves that 

 there is some interest still left in the conservation of resources this side of 

 Alaska and even of the Rocky Mountains. 



In my early life the mountains that I knew were those whose azure tops 

 appeared on clear autumn evenings along the horizon's rim to the northwest- 

 ward the mountains which Spottswood with his knights of the Horse-Shoe 

 had crossed to plant beyond them the flag and establish the civilization of the 

 Anglo-Saxon the mountains amid which George Washington had spent his 

 useful and sobering youth as a young surveyor in communion with Nature and 

 God, and which he had penetrated at that age which seems so great to boys 

 the age of bare majority to carry the message of the Anglo-Saxon to the 

 Frank in his commanding fort at the junction of the Allegheny and the Mo- 

 nongahela. An old map of North America used to hang on the walls of the 

 sitting room in my old home in Virginia, nestled amid primeval oaks and 

 hickories beneath which Tottapottamoy children must have played. It con- 

 tained meagre details only as far west as a short distance beyond the Mis- 

 sissippi River. All the rest was blank, save that there were large lettered 

 names of territories with vague boundaries in the wide expanse to the west- 

 ward and h(y()n(l was a mountain range sawed across the west, marked 

 ''Rocky Mountains," with the fringe of the Pacific Coast beyond them. To 

 the northwestward beyond a great blank, vague space, marked "British Colum- 



