THE CONFERENCE PROPER 



45 



do so much wishing and resolving, but do 

 business. 



The next thing you want to do is to go 

 among your people; go out as missionaries 

 among the people. Do not get it into your 

 heads that all of our people, and even our 

 legislators, know about this business, for they 

 don't know about it. None of us have known 

 much about it except for a few years. 



In 1885, in the State of New York, the first 

 Commission in the United States was organ- 

 ized. At that time not one single educated 

 forester lived in the United States, not one 

 forestry school existed at any college of the 

 United States. Twenty-three years ago ! And 

 it took us twenty years to do the preliminary 

 work, and it is only within the last three 

 years that we have aroused the whole people 

 in the State of New York. How did we 

 do it? We got out among them, at their 

 homes, and made speeches ; told them of the 

 wonderful cut of timber, and the great amount 

 it was over the natural production. We told 

 them of the history of China, and of France, 

 and of the other countries, where the timber 

 has been swept from the hillsides and the 

 land denuded and made worthless for agri- 

 cultural purposes, as the Governor from Cali- 

 fornia told us about a moment ago. 



You cannot have a country worth living in 

 without forests, and the proof of it is the his- 

 tory of the whole world. You cannot have 

 water flowing from the uplands without for- 

 ests. 



You are talking about conserving forests. 

 New York City has spent $150,000,000 to 

 build a reservoir at Kingston to get water 

 for the four million people in the City of 

 New York. If New York City does not pro- 

 tect the trees upon those historic hills, the 

 Catskills, that reservoir will have been built 

 in vain, and they will have to go somewhere 

 else for their water supply. Why? Because, 

 when you destroy God's reservoir under the 

 trees, man can never build one as good. It 

 takes that natural reservoir to keep and hold 

 the water, and you can only keep that on the 

 hillsides bv keeping the trees there. 



Someone in the report of this Commission 

 has said that there is as much water as there 

 has ever been, and that we could not create 

 water. Those men that drew the original 

 report of this National Commission are mis- 

 taken. You let a spring dry up on a moun- 

 tain side because you have taken the trees 

 away. That water is gone. It has gone 

 from thousands of our springs today. But 

 you reforest that hillside and you will repro- 

 duce the water. Those springs dry out be- 

 cause the forests are gone, but you reforest 

 the hillsides and the water will come back. 



There is too much to the subject for any 

 man to undertake to cover it in ten minutes. 

 You have to have forests in the country, 

 ladies and gentlemen, because of a hundred 

 things. First, it affects the climate. It af- 

 fects the rainfall. It is valuable to the agri- 

 cultural industry. 



Without forests, in a rolling State like New 



York, or like Pennsylvania, you cannot have 

 producing agricultural land. Am I not right? 

 If water is not absolutely necessary to good 

 farm lands, tell me why it is that the arid 

 lands of the West do not produce without it. 

 Tell me why it is that that far-famed, beauti- 

 ful valley of the Euphrates, that we have 

 heard so much about in song and story, that 

 was once as beautiful as a dream, because_of 

 its forests and streams, is today a howling 

 waste? Simply because the forest trees were 

 cut away and the waters dried up. 



You must have water. You must have the 

 forests in order to have the water. 



Now, hear me. You men from Kansas and 

 from Ohio, and from Indiana, or any level 

 State, do not need the forest trees for agri- 

 cultural purposes so much as we do in New 

 York and Pennsylvania and the East. Why? 

 Stop and think. In New York State all but 

 four of the great rivers of the State head in 

 the Adirondacks and Catskills, in that two 

 thousand feet high upland plateau. The 

 streams, when not protected, run rapidly 

 away and the water is wasted. It does not 

 even have a chance to evaporate. But on the 

 level plains of Kansas it falls upon flat land 

 and it soaks into the ground; it saturates the 

 soil, it produces moisture necessary for weeks 

 and for months, for the crops to grow upon 

 the land. 



We of the East must have the forests. 

 You can get along out there if you don't 

 have so much forest. 



So it is rather a local question in respect 

 to the farm lands of the country. We have 

 got to have forests because of their effect 

 upon the healthfulness of a country. Do you 

 not know that the forest trees are constantly 

 pouring off into the air great quantities of 

 oxygen ; that they take up the things that are 

 poisonous to your life and_ grow upon it, and 

 that they furnish that which we must have? 

 Do you not know that they have a wonder- 

 ful effect upon the temperature of the coun- 

 try? Can anyone tell me why it is twenty- 

 five degrees cooler in July at Lake Placid or 

 Saranac than where I live in the Alleghenies, 

 in the same altitude, two hundred miles 

 further south? For no reason in the world 

 except that splendid forest that covers the 

 upland in the northern part of the State of 

 New York. 



Let me make it perfectly clear to you by 

 the simplest illustration. If forests are not 

 as valuable as I say to a country, what would 

 be the condition if today, through some great 

 force in nature, every tree and shrub should 

 be swept from the face of Pennsylvania or 

 New York State? Would not chaos reign 

 tomorrow? Would not the home of every 

 wild bird and every wild animal be de- 

 stroyed? Would not every stream be uncov- 

 ered? Would not the surface of the land be 

 like the roof of this building, for the water 

 to fall on it and run immediately to the 

 stream and down to the great sea and be lost 

 forever? Would not the price of agricul- 

 tural land in those two States depreciate in 



