296 OUR FEDERAL LANDS 



step to securing National Parks, for it is sometimes 

 easier to persuade Congress to change the status of 

 a reservation already created by Presidential proc- 

 lamation than to create the National Park straight- 

 forwardly in the first instance. This has been de- 

 liberately done in two cases within my personal recol- 

 lection, and has been suggested in a number of in- 

 stances. While there may be little danger of dam- 

 aging the National Monuments System by making 

 it a stepping stone to an order of reservations scen- 

 ically higher, the principle involved is inherently 

 wrong, and this practice makes for further belit- 

 tling in the eyes of its creating agencies a system of 

 very great dignity and potential value to posterity. 



The root of these actual and prospective evils 

 is the failure of the national government to con- 

 ceive our National Monuments as a System. I have 

 found nothing in Roosevelt's writings to warrant 

 the belief that either he or Lacey ever previsioned 

 the splendid system which since, like Topsy in "Un- 

 cle Tom's Cabin," just grew. It was his part, in 

 advance of the thinking of his day, to perceive fu- 

 ture values and to provide the governmental ma- 

 chinery for posterity to utilize. It is for some later 

 President to model the hit-or-miss creation of the in- 

 tervening years into a unified grouping of incalcu- 

 lable value to present and succeeding generations. 



The fact is that, in the strictly official view, our 

 National Monuments constitute nothing more than 

 a collection. Unofficially but actually, they consti- 



