128 OUR FEDERAL LANDS 



Forest Service became a colossal engine of investi- 

 gation, and published arrays of facts which aston- 

 ished the nation. 



And all the time, year in and year out, the fire 

 demon, unrestrained, was sweeping away a million 

 acres of woodland every year ! 



The Clarke-McNary Act was the first deed of 

 a nation at last awakened to the tragedy of forest 

 fires. John Davenport Clarke, Representative from 

 New York, and Charles L. McNary, Senator from 

 Oregon, were its sponsors. It passed both houses 

 of the Sixty-Eighth Congress with little opposition. 

 In many respects it was the most important bill 

 signed by President Coolidge during his first half 

 term in office. One fifth of our remaining forest 

 is owned by the nation and administered by one of 

 the most efficient government organizations in the 

 world. The remaining four fifths are owned prin- 

 cipally by farmers, lumbermen, and states. The 

 Clarke-McNary Act proposed a partnership of all 

 parties in ownership for co-operative national fire 

 protection and reforestation, offering the nation's 

 financial help to private landowners to make it ef- 

 fective. Some one has called this union "our na- 

 tional fire department/' but it is far more than that. 

 The act provided for the study of forest taxation in 

 the expectation that states, by reducing taxation, 

 would help make lumber a profitable crop. It pro- 

 vided also a sounder basis for the purchased Nation- 

 al Forests of the future than the Weeks Act by mak- 



