THE AMERICAN MENTAL ATTITUDE 131 



All indications show, however, that when he does go forward along new 

 lines of thought, he will go like Kipling's polo player, like his trains travel, like 

 he does business generally, like he goes when he fights as a bull or a bear in 

 the wheat pit. 



Conservation and all its kindred "isms" has taken hold of the American 

 mind more than sporadically, it is really assuming constitutional activity. 



Jolting out to the lumber district a day or so ago in a rather smelly and 

 not nearly up-to-date car in this great western metropolis of Chicago, I over- 

 heard a remark to show that the idea of efficiency in management has filtered 

 down a long way. Two young railroad men were talking. They may have 

 been switchmen and were sooty and dusty with the grime of their labor, but 

 their eyes were bright with health, and while their pronunciation was very 

 much "Chimmie Fadden," they talked with intelligence, if not with elegance. 



A butcher's wagon had stalled so that a wheel almost grazed the car. 

 The name of the butcher had been beautifully painted on the side of the 

 meat delivery bus, and it was large, attractive and noticeable, but to the 

 average man it was only a name, but to one of these young railroad men it 

 was something else and he said: 



''Say, Bill, ain't dat de name of de guy wot told all the railroad brass 

 collars how to save a million dollars a day in running de roads?" It was 

 a similar name Louis Brandis. 



Having reason recently to go out into the length and breadth of the 

 literary realms of this country to secure articles on wood waste efficiency, 

 conservation, and all those cousins of the forestry movement for publication 

 in a lumber newspaper soon to be launched in the West, I was surprised by 

 the number of high class people who knew what was wanted and caught at 

 the spirit of the thing at once and offered to write reams and reams of pub- 

 lishable stuff that I only feared could be gotten in such niggardly quantities 

 that the assembling of it would be difficult. This was borne in on me early 

 in November when I met an old friend, an advertising man, whose real busi- 

 ness is advertising signs, putting up those odd and awful things that direct 

 people to somebody or another's soap, or declare by winking lights that some- 

 one's automobile is the only one on which the wheels are really round. 



At all events, I never had any right in the world to imagine that this most 

 interesting friend of mine was a possible contributing editor. 



But he was. 



Something was said, of course, about the subject of most interest to me 

 and this great big forceful American, the engineer of the blinking lights, 

 leaned across the table, in the buffet smoker on the train and long after even 

 the porter had gone to bed talked of a summer that he had spent with the 

 Over Forester in the Great Black Forest in Baden Baden, and of the times 

 when the trees were to be sacrificed and the preparations that were made for 

 taking down those trees that had ripened and of the old women and the boys 

 and girls who always gathered about eager for the privilege of gathering up 

 every little twig and limb in order to carry it away and use it. It was 

 a pretty story and it will appear some time in the column rules in extended 

 form. 



We, who love trees sentimentally, but who wish to use them as they 

 were intended to be used, should not feel in the least pessimistic on account 



