THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



615 



of free rural delivery mail routes from 

 8,000 to over 40,000. The President has 

 just called a commission on country 

 life to make an exhaustive study of the 

 conditions of rural life, of what it is 

 possible to be done by the Government 

 to eliminate the element of isolation 

 and loneliness, to introduce telephones, 

 parcel post, better roads, and other 

 measures to help forward that move- 

 ment upon which the whole future of 

 civilization depends the movement 

 back to the land. 



More advances in agriculture have 

 been made in one generation than have 

 been made before since the red Indian 

 ploughed his maize with a stag-horn 

 and hoed it with a clam-shell, or invoked 

 the rain with the incantation of a howl- 

 ing Dervish. All the past has not per- 

 formed the miracles with the soil which 

 science has wrought in forty years, and 

 all the literature of science, so far as I 

 know, holds no more charming tale than 

 that buried in the Government stacks 

 of plain black cloth and paper-covered 

 farmers' bulletins, and United States 

 agricultural reports and year-books 

 the romance of science and the soil 

 of the making of two farmers grow 

 where one grew before. Let some one 

 sing us a new song now " Tis the 

 man with a plough." He is the foremost 

 figure in the landscape, this belated 

 scientist ; and he is such solely and only 

 because the American world made up 

 its mind that in this field at least, indi- 

 vidualism and laissez-faire are played 

 out. No sturdier blow has ever been 

 given to the shabby pretensions of 

 laissez-faire than that by the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture of the United 

 States. 



FORESTRY 



The annual growth of wood in our 

 American forests does not average more 

 than twelve cubic feet per acre, or the 

 total annual growth is less than 7,000,- 

 000,000 cubic feet. But we are taking 

 23,000,000,000 feet from the woods 

 every year. "We use each year 100,- 

 000,000 cords of firewood, 40,000,- 

 000,000 feet of lumber, more than a 

 billion post and fence rails, 118,000,000 



hewn ties, one and a half billion staves, 

 over 133,000,000 sets of heading, nearly 

 500,000,000 barrel - hoops, 3,000,000 

 cords of native pulp-wood, 165,000,000 

 cubic feet of round mine timbers, and 

 one and a quarter million cords of wood 

 for distillation." 



This is used every year. What we 

 waste is appalling. An average of 

 50,000,000 acres of forest has been 

 burned over yearly since 1870, and the 

 annual average loss by forest fires for 

 that forty years has been fifty lives and 

 10,000,000 pounds sterling worth of 

 lumber. But the waste in lumber-pro- 

 duction is even more startling because 

 wholly unnecessary and avoidable. In 

 the case of yellow pine alone, in 1907, it 

 is estimated that only one-half the cut 

 was usd, and 8,000,000 cords wasted, 

 twenty per cent of the whole cut having 

 been left on the grounds in the woods 

 to rot a waste representing the entire 

 output of 300,000 acres in the matter 

 of yellow pine for the year 1907 alone. 

 And there is still more criminal waste 

 at the mill. Only 320 feet of lumber 

 have been used for each thousand feet 

 t hat stood in the forest. Enough timber is 

 destroyed by fire every year to last the 

 Nation for three months, and, not count- 

 ing the losses from forest fires, we are 

 using up three and a half times the 

 yearly growth. The condition of the 

 world's supply of timber makes it more 

 and more necessary to become self- 

 sufficing, or to do more and more with- 

 out the use of wood. 



There is a vital relationship between 

 forest and stream in any rational econo- 

 my. The problems cannot be separated, 

 therefore they must be coordinated. 

 The inhabitants of the Mississippi flats 

 are among the first to suffer from the 

 tree thief and the land-skinner among 

 the countless tributaries. There is in- 

 separable relation between river-bottom 

 or desert plain and the wooded moun- 

 tain of faraway interiors. 



High up on the forested canons Na- 

 ture has built her great sponge reser- 

 voirs and her dams of moss and fern. 

 Above these yet, are the ice and snow. 

 Here open thousands of tiny sluiceways 

 for the oozing waters that have been 



