404 Proceedings of the 



yet it is worthy of record here, that this measure has 

 passed the House of Representatives and is now pend- 

 ing in the Senate of the United States; and your 

 judgment and influence will go far, no doubt, to secure 

 its passage through that wise and great though some- 

 what slow moving body. We have at the head of the 

 Department of Agriculture the great head of forestry. 

 I, perhaps, do not mean the gentlemen that you are all 

 thinking of. It is not my dear young friend, Mr. 

 Pinchot, but the old man, who comes from the prairie 

 State of Iowa, a State whose chief forests consisted 

 of hazelbrush in the days when the Secretary of Agri- 

 culture first settled in his magnificent domain. And I 

 might say to you that so far as that State is concerned, 

 it is quite too rich to use much of it for forestry. They 

 can hardly afford it. With the land at one hundred 

 dollars an acre to plant out in trees, the crop of which 

 will be harvested seventy-five years from now, is almost 

 too expensive even for a nation to undertake, so Iowa 

 will never be a forest producing State. The head of 

 this department will be succeeded some day — I hope a 

 long time in the future — by some man of equally com- 

 prehensive grasp and an equally prophetic view of the 

 future. That department has come to stay, and it is 

 a department that may look far into the future and 

 do that for the nation and for the people which the 

 private individual, or even the State, is not adequate 

 to accomplish. And, therefore, it is well that when 

 these reservations have finally been delimited and their 

 outlines fixed, that they should be transferred, not to a 

 department whose business it is to pass the title away 

 to individuals, but to a department that will hold on 

 to this land, that will turn it over to succeeding admin- 

 istrations, and that will preserve the sources of the 

 water supply of the country in the West, whose future 



