AN AUSTRALIAN STUDY OF AMERICAN FORESTRY. 5 
Precedent is the backbone of existence. Where in all the world is there 
another country which presents a parallel example, horrible or otherwise—an 
Anglo-Saxon democracy in the transitional phase between pioneering and waste, 
and Conservation and Efficiency ? 
Peculiarly enough, it is the United States of America from which already 
Australia has borrowed a constitution. There is no other example. 
This discovery—and others—sent me to America to investigate American 
forestry. 
Cuapter ITI. 
DEVELOPMENT OF U.S.A. FORESTRY. 
In the essentials, America is the elder sister of Australia. 
Both are self-governing Anglo-Saxon democracies, with similar laws and 
institutions and similar prejudices and sentiments. The differences are of 
detail and of age. 
In forestry, America has only fifteen years’ start of us. 
At the beginning, America had nearly 1,000,000,000 acres of woodland. 
Australia, slightly larger in area, had less than 100,000,000 acres— 
one-tenth the forest of United States of America. 
To-day, four-fifths of the American timber lands are privately owned ; 
the same proportion in Australia is publicly owned. 
There are 164,000,000 acres of national forest in the United States of 
America, each forest averaging 1,000,000 acres in extent. 
There will be in Australia, when classification is complete, something like 
16,000,000 acres of public forest, each averaging, perhaps, 10,000 acres— 
ten times the number of American forests, yet only one-tenth the area. 
If America’s forest position has been precarious, how much more so 
Australia’s? 
Youth and profligacy! Pioneering days are wasteful days. The first stage 
in developing a forest policy is deforestation. 
In 1849, an American patent office report referred to the “waste of 
valuable timber ” and denounced “ the folly and short-sightedness of the age.” 
In 1865, came the prophecy in a lengthy article by Rev. Frederick Stair, 
on American Forestry (Fernow’s History of Forestry) : 
“The nation has slept because the gnawing of want has not 
awakened her. She has had plenty and to spare, but within thirty 
years she will be conscious that not only individual want is present, 
but that it comes to each from permanent national famine of wood.” 
Thereafter came the opening up of the West, and the tapping of the great 
forests of the Inland Timber Region; and famine was staved off. At which 
stage the Australian parallel fails—for want of an inland timber region. 
But the fear and expectation were not abated, and in 1872 arbor days 
became the fashion. A year later, the American Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science became concerned, and secured, in 1876, the establishment 
of a forest agency in the Department of Agriculture. 
From that forest agency developed the present Forest Service. 
Nothing further evolved until 1882, when, following upon the visit of 
Baron von Steuben, a Prussian forest official, a forestry congress was held in 
Cincinnatti, and the American Forestry- Association was born. 
