274 UNITED STATES FOREST POLICY 



tural Appropriation Bill to increase this contribution from 25 to 35 

 per cent. The amendment was added in the Senate Committee on Agri- 

 culture and Forestry, and passed the Senate without difficulty, but the 

 House, taking its usual stand, refused to agree to it. Representative 

 Mann of Illinois immediately opposed this "hold up," as he called it, 

 on the ground that 10 per cent of the annual revenue of any business 

 was a very large per cent. "Doubtless there are cases where it is a 

 difficult thing to maintain schools without the help of the general gov- 

 ernment," he said, "but we gave them school lands for the purpose of 

 maintaining schools, which are neither needed nor maintained. We 

 build the roads in these forest reserves, as a general proposition. . . . 

 There is not a farmer in any forest reserve state that would not think 

 he was being robbed at the point of a pistol if he had to pay 35 per 

 cent of his gross receipts as taxes. It is expected that we shall pay to 

 the states 35 per cent of the value of the timber which we sell, after 

 we have let it grow, after we have kept the fires out, after we have 

 protected it for a long time at national expense. I have never seen a 

 proposition which seemed to me so rank in the way of giving prefer- 

 ence to one part of the country over another." 



Morse of Wisconsin pointed out how unjust such a provision would 

 be in its application to the Appalachian forests, where the government 

 was already buying the lands for more than they were worth. Stanley 

 of Kentucky declared that this attempt to "mulct the national treas- 

 ury," if it were "proposed as a matter of substantive law instead of 

 being done by subterfuge," would not get twenty votes in the House. 

 Other men were almost equally outspoken in their opposition — Hitch- 

 cock of Nebraska, Keifer of Ohio, Tawney of Minnesota, and Payne 

 of New York. Scott of Kansas, who had the appropriation bill in 

 charge, was strongly opposed to the amendment, but stated that it 

 was the belief of the House conferees that it would be impossible to 

 get the Senate to agree to the conference report unless the increase 

 were allowed. 



Many of the western congressmen rallied to the support of this 

 proposition. Englebright of California mentioned one county in Cali- 

 fornia in which the government forest reserve included $50,000,000 

 worth of property, yet had sold only $445 worth of timber and so had 

 turned over only $100 to the state in lieu of taxes. Martin and Rucker 



