]5 



structions in cases of fires required for cooking, warmth or 

 industrial purposes, and the Ontario Act very properly makes it 

 imperative that every person in charge of a drive of timber, survey 

 or exploring party, or any other party requiring camp fires, shall 

 once in each week read and explain to his men the provisions of 

 the Act. The Quebec Act omits this very necessary precaution, 

 necessary because railway and other surveyors are sometimes 

 among the greatest offenders against the Act. The Quebec Act 

 also omits the proviso which the Ontario statute includes, that 

 locomotive engineers shall have their fire boxes properly guarded 

 and their smoke-stacks furnished with screens. Both Acts, how- 

 ever, only impose a penalty of fifty dollars or three months 

 imprisonment if that is not paid, for any infringment of the Act. 

 Now, when such wholesale destruction is often the result, why 

 should the offender receive so light a punishment ? Why should 

 not the offence be visited with heayy imprisonment without the 

 option of a fine ? Those in charge of drives of timber, surveying 

 parties, &c., should be m'ade personally responsible for the acts in 

 this respect of those under them, under the penalty of a fine, 

 whilst the actual culprit should in all cases be liable to imprison- 

 ment. So important is this question of the protection of the 

 forests from fires, not merely to the governments which have the 

 administration of the Crown Lands, and to lumbermen who lease 

 them, and to the bankers who make advances on timber limits, 

 but also to the large number of settlers in the new districts who 

 have been in the past and are liable to be in the future rendered 

 destitute and homeless through these bush fires, that it is sugges- 

 tive whether it would not be well that every Crown Lands agent 

 or bushranger should be constituted a fire inspector, whose duty 

 should be to enquire into the cause of each bush fire, with a view 

 to the detection and punishment of the offender. As facts now 

 are, the offender is probably in most cases an employee, from 

 whom the amount of the fine could never be collected, and hence 

 there could be no attraction to an informer to go to the large 

 amount of trouble and expense necessary in these distant districts 

 to secure a conviction. 



