272 FOREST OUTINGS 



in the South or by writers at the border, facing South. And many of these 

 writers are moved simply by what they see from day to day all around them 

 to examine with intense interest all proposals to strengthen and beautify the 

 South's remaining natural resources from the ground up. 



To this end Gerald W. Johnson, Hamilton Owens, and Phillip Wagner, 

 particularly, contribute to Maryland's Sun papers strong writing, and edi- 

 torial direction. In North Carolina, on the Raleigh News and Observer, 

 there is Jonathan Daniels; in South Carolina, on the Columbia State- 

 Record, James Derieux; in Kentucky, Herbert Agar of the Louisville Cour- 

 ier; in Alabama, John Temple Graves of the Birmingham Age-Herald. 

 Many others might be named who, if they write less often about conserva- 

 tion, know what they are writing about in terms of the land they live on, and 

 who, when they do write about it, hit hard. For instance, Frederick Sullens, 

 editor of the Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News since 1905; and in Texas, 

 Peter Molyneaux of The Texas Weekly. 



To the north, there are among many, J. N. Darling and W. W. Way- 

 mack of the Des Moines Register-Tribune, William Allen White of the Em- 

 poria Gazette, William T. Evjue of the Madison (Wisconsin) Capital-Times, 

 Henry J. Haskell of the Kansas City Star. On the west coast, to name but 

 two, Paul Smith of the San Francisco Chronicle and Richard Neuberger of 

 the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, stand forth to defend the land from harm. 



REPORTERS' books describing, interpreting, both the world scene and 

 the domestic scene, stand remarkably high on any list of books that Ameri- 

 cans are reading now, and the same lists carry many a work by statesmen 

 and scholars who have learned to write with the direct thrust expected of 

 reporters. It is not strange that men in the Government service, and especially 

 in the Department of Agriculture, should write continually and with growing 

 concern of land and tenure problems. By the very nature of their work they 

 have been for years up against a realization that with the continent 

 settled, in the main, forests slaughtered, natural beauty and quiet laid to 

 waste, soils skinned, waters sullied, and water tables sharply altered, basic 

 conditions can no longer be described as fundamentally sound. But it is 

 heartening and significant that there should have been so many contribu- 



