CONCLUSION 373 



to regard their own interests as identical with the interests of the 

 people as a whole. The people of the West have not been alone in 

 placing too great an emphasis on increasing population, growing 

 cities, and rising real estate values; but they have represented the 

 most extreme development of this common error. 



The characteristics of many of the western people, as of the 

 frontiersmen at all times, were such that they would not possibly have 

 been friendly to the reservation policy at first. Their boundless opti- 

 mism made them unreceptive to predictions of future danger, while 

 a certain shortsightedness made them generally slow to consider any- 

 thing but the very near future. Their individualism and dislike of 

 restraint naturally made them hostile to the bureaucratic govern- 

 ment of the forest reserves ; and the goodness or badness of that gov- 

 ernment was not in their eyes an important matter. Many western 

 people wanted to govern themselves ; and a corrupt and inefficient 

 government has not infrequently suited them quite as well as any 

 other. Their lack of respect for experience, their deep-rooted dislike 

 for experts and "theorists" — taking the form of a contempt for all 

 special training or learning — would have made them hostile to the 

 administration of the forest reserves, no matter how efficient and 

 intelligent that administration might have been. The fact that, by 

 the elimination of land stealing and other frauds, and by the avoid- 

 ance of the wasteful destruction and blasted barrenness which goes 

 with unregulated private exploitation, the reservation policy pre- 

 sented certain ethical and aesthetic gains, would not have seemed 

 very important to a people who pride themselves on being extremely 

 "practical" — a people who really are practical and materialistic to 

 the extent of overemphasizing the cash side of most social and eco- 

 nomic questions. 



In further extenuation of the western attitude toward conservation, 

 it must be granted that conservation has been something of a fad 

 and a hobby with some of its advocates. Pinchot once stated that 

 one of the beauties of "conservation" was that no one could say he 

 was opposed to it. As President Taft once said: "The subject of 

 conservation is rather abstruse, but there are a great many people 

 in favor of conservation, no matter what it means. "^ 



2 Outlook, May 14, 1910, 57. 



