333 REPORT OF THE FORESTRY COMMITTEE 



fornia has received 8,370,701 acres ; Colorado, 5,431,232 ; Idaho, 4,631,779 ; Min- 

 nesota, 8,341,718; New Mexico, 12,556,037; Oregon, 5,350,383; Utah, 8,414,376; 

 Washington, 4,044,471; Wisconsin, 5,095,351; Michigan, 7,512,877. Included 

 within these grants were some of the choicest bodies of timber lands known. 



It is within the bounds of truth to say that not one of these States either 

 appreciated the priceless heritage bestowed on it or realized the importance of 

 protecting it. Nor even at this late time has a single State a well-defined policy- 

 expressed in law and adequately supported, looking to the properly co-ordinated 

 care, disposition, and conservation of its natural resources. There is hardly a 

 public land State in which there have not been charges of graft and fraud in con- 

 nection with the disposition of public lands. Scandals of great and small pro- 

 portions have been so numerous as to be commonplace. 



Generally, the chief purpose has seemed to be to get rid of the public lands 

 at any price, with the consequences that enormous areas have passed, without 

 regard to value, into the hands of speculators pure and simple, of non-residents 

 of those who had absolutely no interest except to strip the land at whatever 

 cost or waste without regard to the future. When earnest, sincere men sought 

 to remedy abuses, they were sneered at as dreamers and reformers, and where 

 policies were sought to be established by the State they were as vacillating as the 

 swinging pendulum. 



Vast areas were donated by the States for roads that were never built, water 

 fronts were given away without any consideration, tide and swamp lands were 

 granted on promises that,never materiahzed, and vast areas of the choicest timber 

 lands sold for a song. These statements are not exaggerations. On the con- 

 trary, they are mild when compared to what the facts justify. The same story 

 runs through them all, whether in Wisconsin or Oregon, Michigan or California. 



Indeed we are forced to the conclusion that there is some impelling cause 

 acting in the premises, too powerful to resist. There is, and that cause is pre- 

 cisely the one now appealed to — selfishness and the opportunity for immediate 

 personal gain. The future seems to weigh as nothing against the temptation of 

 securing some possible immediate profit when dealing with public property. Some 

 one proposes to undertake some popular public improvement, perhaps local in 

 its nature, and to take in exchange a tract of forest or other State lands. By 

 skilful appeals a sentiment is soon created which the legislature cannot withstand, 

 and with a stroke of a pen public property is gone forever. Then only does the 

 public awaken to the fact that once again an inheritance has been exchanged for 

 a mess of pottage. Experience in this respect counts for nothing. All that is 

 needed is a new scheme, a clever operator, and the trick is done. Who of us is 

 there who has been reared in public land States but will admit that the picture 

 is not overdrawn? But we need not confine ourselves to generalizations. 



WISCONSIN 



THE public reports of every State bear mute but eloquent witness to the 

 facts. We take the following from Vincent Phelan's "The Financial 

 History of Wisconsin," issued in 1908. 



"The management of Wisconsin's public domain has been marked bv 

 mefficiency, carelessness and fraud. The State has sustained great losses 



