102 OUR FEDERAL LANDS 



It is useless to multiply facts and instances, 

 which could be cited by hundreds. During this long 

 period lumber legislation occupied a considerable 

 part of every session of Congress. In the painstaking 

 cataloguing of Congressional bills and enactments 

 and of administrative acts affecting forests compiled 

 by Dr. John Ise of the University of Kansas ("The 

 United States Forest Policy," Yale University 

 Press), the names of certain legislators from for- 

 ested states principally in the west recur again and 

 again. It is surprising how small the group, when 

 all is told, which handled in Congress this transfer 

 of vast national wealth to the railroad magnates, 

 speculators and unabashed thieves who for many 

 years made grabbing the nation's forests a highly 

 specialized and enormously profitable business. But 

 still more surprising is it to the plain citizen to dis- 

 cover how easily political conventions and Congres- 

 sional tradition served to restrain from interference 

 the mass of well-meaning but ignorant representa- 

 tives in Congress of the general people. The his- 

 toric assumption that all natural resources within a 

 state's boundaries belong solely to its own people 

 and that "foreign" Congressmen are presumptuous 

 in advancing national claims thereto is the first 

 "principle" pounded into the heads of newcomers 

 in Congress. Trading votes was as common then as 

 it is now and always will be, and then as now the 

 interest of political parties was skilfully distorted 

 to cover a multitude of sins of commission as well 

 as omission which were made to look like policy in- 



