AN AUSTRALIAN STUDY OF AMERICAN FORESTRY. 11 
conditions will be avoided by gradual adjustment after due notice, 
and where competing interests must be reconciled, the question will 
always be decided from the standpoint of the greatest good to the 
greatest number in the long run.” 
Surely words of wisdom | 
Cuaptmr VI. 
BIRTH OF THE U.S.A. FOREST SERVICE. 
Democracy also has its disadvantages. One of them is that national 
development is subject to a many-sided and fickle public will. 
In a democracy, therefore, a necessary step towards reform is the educa- 
tion and cudgelling of the public to the necessity of reform. 
Whence the development. of publicity as an essential part of the machinery 
of democratic government. 
Up to 1905, the work of the old Bureau of Forestry had been propagandist. 
During the first twenty years of its existence, it produced 20,000 pages 
of printed matter. 
Later, it became more advisory ; working plans—so-called—were prepared 
for public owners; its publications became more technical. 
Up to 1905 the surveying of the National Forests had been controlled by 
the Department of Geological Survey. 
It had completed some 70,000,000 acres, out of 162,000,006 acres—at a 
cost of £300,000, or about one penny per acre. 
Up to 1905, the administration of the National Forests had been vested 
in the General Land Office. A force of superintendents and rangers existed, 
wholly supervisional and essentially “practical,” condemning technique, and 
without any real conception of forest management and the task before it. 
The assemblage of these scattered sections of the forest control created a 
living force, which, as the newly constituted United States of America Forest 
Service, started out immediately on a career of extraordinary development, 
On the flood of the tide of educational enthusiasm following the estab- 
lishment of forest schools at Cornell in 1898, Yale in 1899, and Michigan in 
1903, arrived the new American forester, crammed full of technique and 
energy. 
The first phase was that of the purely European ideas. The new depart- 
ment attempted strenuously to copy German technique, before it had acquired 
any fundamental knowledge of American conditions or how to adapt forestry 
practice to those conditions. European forms had to be followed. All else was 
regarded as forest quackery. Working plans bulked largely in the scheme, 
and the initiation of intensive silviculture was begun forthwith. 
This was revolution rather than evolution. And it failed—because of that 
fact, and because in Europe business training was a minor quantity in forestry. 
The administration bumped against the practical problems of the moment, 
the biggest one of democratic government, It fell foul of the conflicting 
interests of the lumberman, the grazier, and the settler. It was styled 
academic, inane, ignorant, incapable, incompetent, and unjust. Significantly 
enough, neither graft nor dishonesty was amongst the charges levelled at it. 
B 
