THE PERIOD FROM 1878 TO 1891 117 



the bill, the forest reserve clause being to some extent balanced by the 

 clause broadening the scope of the Free Timber Act. Furthermore, 

 most of the provisions of the bill, in fact all but the forest reserve pro- 

 vision, had been debated over and over, and members were so familiar 

 with the main points involved that they were probably less careful to 

 scrutinize the conference bill than they would have been to examine 

 an ordinary bill. Doubtless very few, if any, of the members realized 

 what important results were to flow from the passage of this little 

 forest reserve section. The attitude of Congress in regard to subse- 

 quent as well as previous legislation indicates clearly that very few 

 of the members of either house realized how extensively the President 

 ■ftould use the power conferred here. Finally, it must be considered 

 ^^Lat this was a bill reported from a conference committee, a sort of 

 ^^■11 not easy to amend. Any amendment would have delayed the bill, 

 ^^^Krhaps defeated it ; and on some of the items, as, for instance, the 

 ^^repeal of the Preemption and Timber Culture acts, the public demand 

 had in the course of ten years gathered considerable power. This last 

 consideration was doubtless of greater weight in the House, where 

 the members are usually more in need of campaign material, and at 

 this time feared to close another session without having accomplished 

 some kind of a revision of the land laws. 



Somewhat strangely, the bill encountered greater opposition in the 

 , House than in the Senate. Dunnel of Minnesota distrusted the entire 

 bill because it had not been printed, while McRae of Arkansas opposed 

 section 24 for the very Democratic reason that it put too much power 

 in the hands of the President ; but Payson carried the measure safely 

 through the discussion. This was on February 28. When the bill came 

 up again on March 2, there was no time for discussion and it passed 

 without a comment. 



Thus the passage of the Forest Reserve Act, the first important 

 conservation measure in the history of our national forest policy, 

 cannot be credited to congressional initiative, but to a long chain of 

 peculiar circumstances which made it impossible for Congress to act 

 directly on the question. If the conference committee, like most public 

 land committees, had included a majority of men hostile to conserva- 

 tion ; if the forest reserve provision had been attached to anything 

 but a conference bill; if the question had come up at the beginning 



