Fighting Fires and Thieves 189 



easily be put out when they first start. All effort 

 must therefore tend towards a speedy detection of 

 the incipient blazes. How can this be done ? 



First of all there should be somebody in every 

 forest neighborhood whose express business it is to 

 be on the lookout for fires. To leave this duty to 

 the chance action of volunteers is to leave it un- 

 done. On large, compact tracts of land this duty 

 would naturally be attended to by the owners, who 

 would soon enough find it profitable to maintain 

 their own fire police, but, unfortunately, large, con- 

 tinuous tracts of timber-land owned by the same 

 parties are rare ; and here we come to another con- 

 dition which is an obstacle in the way of forestry 

 reform in this country. 



Ever since the beginning of the federal gov- 

 ernment it has been its laudable aim to prevent the 

 rise of a class of large land-owners tilling their 

 holdings either by gangs of hired laborers or 

 through the help of dependent tenants. It was 

 rightly judged that a continuance of a large and 

 influential class of yeomen farmers, such as existed 

 at the time of the Revolution in New England and 

 the middle States, was essential to the stability of 

 democratic institutions. With this object in view 

 the method of disposing of the public lands was 

 from time to time amended. The recognition of 

 squatters' rights, the pre-emption and homestead 

 laws, all tended to restrict the acquisition of public 

 lands to parcels of a few acres by each individual, 

 so that the normal size of an American land-owner's 



