HOSTILITY TO NATIONAL FORESTS 271 



action, but instead of restoring the land to the public domain, he 

 secured from Congress in 1910 an act specifically authorizing such 

 withdrawals. The effect of this legislation, it later developed, was to 

 restrict rather than enlarge the authority of the President, for the 

 Supreme Court later held that previous legal authority was sufficient. 

 In June, 1916, the total withdrawals amounted to nearly 50,000,000 

 acres, of which 45,935,954 acres were coal and oil lands, 2,352,652 

 acres were power sites, and 193,272 acres were public water reserves. 

 Naturally this policy brought various interests, other than the timber 

 interests, into a position of hostility to the reservation policy.^* 



OPPOSITION TO SAVING FOR POSTERITY 



An argument that interference with the immediate development of 

 the West might yet be a good thing for posterity, has not appealed to 

 some of the western men, for some of them have not been at all con- 

 cerned about the interests of posterity. As Senator Teller said in 

 Congress a decade ago : "I do not believe there is either a moral or 

 any other claim upon me to postpone the use of what nature has given 

 me, so that the next generation or generations yet unborn may have 

 an opportunity to get what I myself ought to get."^^ 



DISCRIMINATION AGAINST THE WEST 



A great many complaints have always been made that the West is 

 being denied the same advantages the East had in an earlier period. 

 As Senator Carter once expressed it: "The state of Maine and the 

 state of Illinois and Iowa and Missouri and Wisconsin enjoyed, 

 through the operation of the laws that have heretofore obtained within 

 their respective boundaries, the full benefit of the natural resources 

 the great Creator had placed there; but these states of the Rocky 

 Mountains and the western slope, where nature presents the hardest 

 conditions settlers have ever faced on this continent, must conduct 

 their local affairs subject to a tribute to the Federal government upon 

 the natural resources within their borders."^® Representative Martin 



2* Stat. 36, 583, 847, 855; 37, 4d7: Report, Sec. of Int., 1916, Vol. L, 174, 510: 

 "Land Decisions," 37, 277; 41, 528: Wilcox vs. Jackson; 38 U. S., 498: Wolsey vs. 

 Chapman; 101 U. S., 755. 



25 Cong. Rec, Feb. 26, 1909, 3226. 



26 Coriff. Rec, Feb. 26, 1909, 3245. 



