282 UNITED STATES FOREST POLICY 



within National Forests." The Forest Service has been exchanging 

 lands outside the reserves for state lands included wherever it is pos- 

 sible to do so, however, and it is hoped that this complaint will be 

 heard less frequently in the future. It is to the advantage of the 

 Forest Service as well as the states that the reserves should be con- 

 solidated wherever possible. Wherever Congress has authorized ex- 

 changes they are being made.^® 



ROBBING THE WESTERN FORESTS FOR THE EASTERN FORESTS 



Within recent years there has been some complaint that the gov- 

 ernment is "robbing" the western forests for the benefit of the new 

 Appalachian reserves. As Mondell once expressed it: "We are now 

 trying to maintain a good-natured attitude toward the Appalachian 

 Forest Reserves, but I fear that we cannot, if gentlemen insist on 

 robbing our reserves of proper appropriations in order to appropriate 

 money for the maintenance of the Appalachian Reserves. I notice 

 this, that while you take this money away from our reserves at the 

 rate of 2 cents an acre, . . . you apply it to the Appalachian Re- 

 serves at the rate of 20 cents an acre, so that it is going to cost, right 

 oif the bat, 10 times as much per acre to take care of this Appa- 

 lachian land as it does to take care of the western forest land."*" 



OBJECTION TO AN "ALIEN GOVERNMENT." 



Just as in an earlier period, many western people have been com- 

 plaining that the reservation policy subjects them to the exactions 

 of a bureaucratic, alien government. The W^est is said to be "rele- 

 gated to the position of Federal provinces," governed by a "gigantic 

 feudal landlord, ruling over unwilling tenants by the agency of irre- 

 sponsible bureaus ; traversing every local right, meddling with every 

 private enterprise." The entire policy is pronounced a "transplanted 

 exotic from monarchial Europe, wholly out of harmony with American 

 institutions." "Mr. Pinchot makes his own laws, construes them and 

 executes them," declared E. M. Ammons — later governor of Colo- 

 rado — in a speech a few years ago. "He is the legislative, the judiciary 



z^ Report, Sec. of Agr., 1909, 399; 1912, 473; 1916, 45: Report, Forester, 1914, 

 27; 1915, 20. 



40 Cong. Rec, Mar. 9, 1912, 3108. 



