American Forest Congress 405 



is entirely dependent upon the successful operation of 

 irrigation. And that is why, my friends, this transfer 

 to a different department is a matter now of necessity 

 when this vast domain of sixty-two or sixty-three 

 millions of acres shall have been selected for that 

 purpose. 



There is another reason for the transfer. I referred 

 a moment ago to my young friend, Mr. Pinchot, who 

 is the chief forester of the Department of Agriculture. 

 It has been an anomaly in our legislation that the de- 

 partment of the Government having charge of the 

 forests had none of the skilled foresters of the United 

 States in its employ, and that the department that did 

 not own a tree anywhere was surrounded by the best 

 corps of foresters in the world. The mountain could 

 not come to Mahomet, and so Mahomet is going to the 

 mountain. The department is to be transferred — the 

 service transferred — to that department that is so nota- 

 bly fitted and so organized as to take the permanent 

 care of this magnificent, this wonderful domain. I 

 was born in the woods of Virginia. I moved (thank 

 God), to the prairies, and one of the most unpleasant 

 things of my subsequent life was to return to the woods 

 of Virginia, now West Virginia, to find that the old 

 streams — the old "swimmin' holes" — as Whitcomb 

 Riley calls them, the holes we used to swim in and 

 where we caught so many fish, are now simply gravelly 

 roads. They are highways as dry, as arid, as one of 

 the deserts of Arizona or New Mexico — nothing but 

 beds of gravel. And why is it? Because the trees 

 have been cut down and the springs that were the chil- 

 dren of the forest, have dried up, and instead of a 

 slow running brook digging out holes here and there, 

 clear as crystal and full of water, we have simply an 

 increased torrent after each storm, carrying the pebbles 



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