172 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



April 



we remember what a deluge of men 

 and women filled up Oklahoma. But 

 Uncle Sam turned over in his bed one 

 night, and thanks to a few thousand 

 men such as I have named, determined 

 to reclaim a bit of desert which he had, 

 which was desert only because the wa- 

 ter was not well distributed. Some 

 of these men remember the valley west 

 of Grenada in Spain, where with a 

 proper irrigation they raise thirteen 

 harvests every year. And some of 

 these men highly determined that what 

 was left of the great American desert 

 should be transformed into such para- 

 dises as those which you look upon 

 from the Alhambra. A few thousand 

 well-led men are at work at this mo- 

 ment on calling such a paradise into 

 existence. 



And before many years, not to say 

 months, the time will come for the 

 John Winthrop of the future or the 

 John Smith or the Lord Baltimore, or 

 the Manasseh Cutler, to hang out his 

 banner in one of the lower wards of 

 New York, or on First street or Sec- 

 ond street in Philadelphia, or in some 

 district of Chicago, and he will say : 

 "A chance for one thousand men, wo- 

 men, boys and girls to go together and 

 to make a new home !" 



Perhaps he will give the new home a 

 name. Perhaps he will call it Roose- 

 velt, or Lincoln, or Garfield, or New- 

 lands, or by some other name of which 

 good men are proud. And then the 

 young Miltiades will have to hurry 

 backward and forward from fifty 

 promising situations to select the place 

 for the new home. And then on some 

 fine day four or five giant engines will 

 snort and blow and start, each with a 

 score or two of cars behind it. And 

 these cars will contain the household 

 goods and the old familiar furniture 

 of the thousand adventurers will con- 

 tain the choral of the child and the 

 genealogical tree of the grandfather. 

 And a few days more will bring them 

 into the promised land, and in a few 

 vears there will be a "cheerful city" 

 there "builded by their sun-burned 

 nands." 



It must be with some such leader- 

 ship as this the leadership of the 

 young and the brave that the rush 

 from the cities will begin. Then they 

 will enjoy the blessing promised to 

 him whose "tree [is] planted by the 

 rivers of water, that bringeth forth 

 his fruit in his season." 



HOW SHALL FOREST LANDS BE 



TAXED ? * (In Two Parts) 







PART II A Proposition to Encourage 

 the Growing of Forests for Profit 



BY 

 ALFRED GASKILL 



Forest Inspector, U, S. Forest Service. 



HOW FORESTS SHOULD BE TAXED. 



approaching this subject one natu- 

 1 lv turns to those European coun- 

 tries in which forestry has become an 

 art, for, manifestly, no oppressive bur- 

 den of taxes could be borne where the 



growing of trees is found to be so 

 profitable. The conclusions from such 

 a study are two : ( I ) That the systems 

 of taxation are so radically different 

 from ours that only general principles 

 can be applied here; and (2) that the 



Paper read before Society of American Foresters and Fourteenth Annual Meeting of 

 the National Wholesale Lumber Dealers Association. 



