1 88 



CONSERVATION 



when I accepted and rejoiced in the 

 saying as one that was full of ripe 

 wisdom. But one night my thoughts 

 ran back along the pathways, half 

 dream, half vision, and I saw such a 

 land, wrapped in age-long peace and 

 forever past its struggles. The very 

 power to make history had perished, 

 and, even in my sight, the people fell 

 apart as a loosened fagot of dry 

 branches gathered by an old peasant 

 woman in a Thuringian forest and 

 that nation ceased to be. "Blessed is 

 the Service," to make our new saying", 

 "that goes on unresting, unhasting, 

 adding strength to strength and wis- 

 dom to wisdom, age after age, and 

 making many volumes of history all its 

 own. 



Really then, the very essence of all 

 these primitive studies of mine of 

 these leaflets from the "B'ook of Be- 

 ginnings"- is that they must move on 

 and on with the actual currents of our 

 lives and our work. They cannot al- 

 ways discourse prettily of ranger-lads, 

 mountain horses, shake-makers, and 

 forest fires. More and more, as the 

 years pass, we are brought up against 

 all those larger problems, social and 

 economic, which are related to good 

 government. Let us be truly glad that 

 it is so, my gentle reader ; that in every 

 forest, in every community, in every 

 honest effort to create new and better 

 conditions, are the seeds of honest dif- 

 ferences of opinion, and all the mate- 

 rials for a first-class conflagration. 



Even forest officers, riding forth like 

 Froissart's knights, a-cardlling down 

 the woodland ways, or sitting among 

 their bluff companions in their sage- 

 green doublets (new uniform, twenty- 

 two ounces, etc!) underneath Lambert- 

 ian Pines even these mighty person- 

 ages have had their bad quarters of 

 hours, as they toiled to make safe and 

 broad those all-essential trails and 

 roads of thought and sympathy which 

 link us to each other and to the whole 

 outside world, until we, and our neigh- 

 bors near and far, become one in re- 

 gard to many vital things. We cannot 

 use pickaxes,, crowbars, and giant 

 powder on these primal roads ; we 



build them somehow, by every word 

 and act ; we maintain them at a great 

 and yet a most reasonable expendi- 

 ture of brain-cell and nerve-force. One 

 must have a way open from heart to 

 heart, here and there, all over a foresc, 

 or the most accurate records, the most 

 methodical bookkeeping, the strictest 

 of Use Book obediences will not save 

 the forest-city in its hours of peril, 

 when cloth-yard arrows are singing 

 through the air like a swarm of yellow- 

 jackets. 



Nearly all of us are dealing with ex- 

 ceedingly attractive frontier communi- 

 ties, representing every conceivable 

 type of American character on its most 

 independent and out-spoken sides. And 

 certain occurrences in recent months 

 "along the fighting line" have set me 

 the age-old human problem once more. 



I think that one learns at last the 

 utter wisdom of evading every sort of 

 introspection the whences, wherefores 

 and whithers, the musty theological 

 paradoxes, and the theses of the me- 

 dieval school men. I think that a for- 

 est officer must neither let himself say, 

 "Am I a success ?" nor, "Am I a fail- 

 ure?" Both are wastes of energy, and 

 not within his sphere of determination. 

 But I do think that he should very of- 

 ten face the larger human problems : 

 "Am I doing the very best that I can 

 for each and all of the little independ- 

 ent communities scattered here and 

 there through the forest?" "Is the best 

 that I can do, high enough to fill the 

 very high requirements of the chang- 

 ing and growing situation?" One's 

 human trails strike miles of iron-wood 

 brush ; one's human roadways run up 

 against basalt and obsidian ; snow- 

 slides and mountain floods sweep down 

 one's rough-and-ready bridges ; signal- 

 fires from peak to peak sometimes 

 warn one that there is still a spirit of 

 dissent abroad. Then it is high time 

 to size up the general problem once 

 more. 



Doing this, in all humility, with all 

 patience and self-separation, one comes 

 at last, I am led to believe, to an un- 

 shaken conception of the purely hu- 

 man side of an American forest offi- 



