Mr. Chitten- 
- den. 
5386 DISCUSSION: FORESTS, RESERVOIRS, AND STREAM FLOW 
charcoal, wood alcohol, or other by-products. In many of our intra- 
mountain districts the timber that has been cut off served a more 
useful and necessary purpose at the time in that new country than it 
ever would again in a thousand years. We must consider the times 
and circumstances before we accuse our fathers of conspiracy against 
posterity in, a profligate waste of our resources. It was not for them 
to save trees where their absence was far more valuable than their 
presence. It is for us, on the other hand, to save them now, for con- 
ditions are reversed; but in doing this, as a plain matter of duty to 
ourselves and justice to posterity, let us not be unjust to our fathers 
by denouncing them for doing the very things we would have done in 
their places, and would have done because they were the proper things 
to do. 
The real waste, the lamentable loss, in our native forests has been 
that resulting from fire. It is difficult to fix the responsibility for this. 
Some of it has been unavoidable, much accidental, a great deal the 
result of carelessness, very little of it wanton or malicious. The first 
and foremost duty of forestry work to-day is to combat and control this 
agency of destruction. 
Quite unnecessarily, Mr. Pinchot reads the writer a lecture to the 
effect “that each part of the soil must be put to the use in which it will 
contribute most to the national welfare.” The whole tenor of the 
writer’s paper is expressed in this sentence. The simple difference 
between the writer’s point of view and that of his critic is that Mr. 
Pinchot holds that forests are of all-embracing and universal benefi- 
cence, while the writer holds that, like any other product of the soil, 
they have a strictly limited, though very important, sphere of influence. 
The writer also holds that their benefits will be greatly enhanced by 
having them as near as possible to the homes of the people. 
The writer will close this review with a reference to the first 
paragraph in Mr. Pinchot’s discussion. He says: 
“In discussing the influence of forests on stream flow, it is un- 
likely that we will ever have a better statement, in certain respects, of 
she case against the forests than that which Colonel Chittenden has 
made. 
Exception is taken to the word “against.” If the writer had 
some project in hand which he considered of great public importance, 
and if a friend were to come to him and point out what seemed to 
be serious defects, while commending the project as a whole, it would 
scarcely be the part of fairness to charge that friend with hostility to 
the enterprise. It is precisely this intolerance of criticism which is one 
of the things most to be criticized in the forestry propaganda. It is 
noteworthy that no one ventures to utter a word in criticism of any 
feature of the propaganda without an apology and a careful ex- 
planation that he has nothing against the cause of forestry itself. The 
