AN AUSTRALIAN STUDY OF AMERICAN FORESTRY. 27 
I think that here, once more, there has been blurred conception and false 
perspective. Once more European forms overshadowed American ideals. 
It is true that a hard and fast line between trade and professional 
forestry-education exists in most of the older countries where forestry has 
been practised intensively for many years. 
It originated, undoubtedly, in the initial endeavour to increase, the effi- 
ciency of men of ranger-grade already employed, who had had no opportunity 
for preliminary training. To develop it to the extent of training students 
solely to perform the work of perpetual subordination, however, is to damn 
them entirely. To a certain extent, the practice of intensive forestry has 
influenced the adoption of a distinction ; but I view it rather as the product 
of the European tradition of professions for the aristocracy and trades for the 
peasantry. 
It is incomprehensible that the system should find favour in a democracy 
such as America professes to be, unless one regards it as due to the fascination 
of the fetish of European precedent, and the immediate influence of German 
foresters in the United States of America: Rather should the basic idea be to 
afford every forestry apprentice an equal opportunity by training to achieve 
promotion from humble beginnings to the highest positions available to his 
effort and merit. 
During recent years, the trend of feeling has been away from this 
hard and fast division of forestry into profession and trade; mainly owing 
to the fact that “full technical training ” as defined by the Conference of Forest 
Schools does not sufficiently emphasise business training and forest economics, 
and a familiarity with existing conditions. 
Forestry to be regarded neither as a profession nor a trade, but as a 
vocation, and forest schools should “bear the same relation to forests and 
forestry and lumbering and wood-using industries that a school of mines bears 
to mines and metallurgy and mine industries, or a school of agriculture bears 
to farms and the agricultural sciences, and the cultivation, harvesting, and 
marketing of food stuffs. Such schools will be in part industrial and give 
vocational training, rather than high professional training.” 
These schools would have a much wider field of usefulness than either a 
professional or a ranger school. They would provide the type of men most 
needed in the present pioneering stages of American and Australian forestry. 
To use a much-abused phrase, they would furnish the “ practical” man rather 
than the “ theorist.” 
“ What such a school should be” is developed by Dorr Skeels in a paper 
on “Forest Ranger Education,” délivered before the Society of American 
Foresters in February, 1916. He affirms the axiom that it must be deter- 
mined first by “ what a forest ranger should be.” 
That, of course, depends somewhat upon the country and the century, 
and the forest situation in particular. 
His conception of a forest ranger in the National Forest Service is a man 
whose “training should be so thorough and broad as to equip him for any 
of the work for which the eastern schools train rangers, as well as to equip 
him for any of the work of a more difficult and responsible nature which lies 
entirely without the province of the eastern school, because the work of a 
Government forest ranger is a public service of national importance . . . .” 
Cc 
