FORESTRY COMMISSION. 91 



3. Even our lightest lands are today excellent stock range and worth 

 more to ns for this purpose than they will be for forest purposes. 



4. You -withdraw large areas of our lands from taxation and thus 

 throw the burden of maintaing school and road and proper civic gov- 

 ernment on the shoulders of a few of us who have our homes and our 

 interests here and cannot well escape. 



There was much triith in these contentions and since this matter 

 must come up again, it is of interest to inquire into these principal 

 arguments. It is but natural, too, that juuch sentiment prevailed and 

 that both sentiment and misunderstanding were fostered by interested 

 persons, but on the whole, the protest was a fair one and well deserved 

 the consideration which it received. "Why reforest and reestablish the 

 ^howling wilderness' we are glad to have behind us?" This argument, 

 as most of the people of the district have by this time fully learned, 

 was based largely on a misunderstanding of the real objects of the 

 Reserves. In a county Avhere only about eight per cent of the land is 

 settled, where one may ride for miles and miles on a kind of a "stump 

 prairie" without seeing house, hovel or camp, and where marsh fires 

 and brushwood fires burn for days without so much as attracting atten- 

 tion, in such a county, the protective efforts of the State can hardly 

 be accused of producing a wilderness. Here a State Forest Banger can 

 only be of benefit to everyone and most of all to the local settler, to 

 the stock farmer and the owner of lands and timber. 



Nor is this all. In a district where 100 days of sleighing indicates 

 the normal winter, where frost must be looked for practically in every 

 month of the year, and where settlement is as slow as it has been in 

 these districts, what could be more desirable and useful than a goodly 

 cover of forest, a shelter against the winter storms, an ample supply 

 of fuel and a local supply for the few mills, which, if proper manage- 

 ment prevails, might find here such a supply for all times to come? 

 Today it is the unsightly, blackened swamp waste which discourages 

 the good settler, it is this stump waste which might be termed the 

 "howling wilderness." What the State is attempting, not the increase 

 of wilderness, but a most useful, in fact, here an indispensable branch 

 ;of agriculture and the only form of agriculture which can be relied on 

 as producing a useful, marketable crop on all of these lands irrespective 

 of seasons. 



"Our lands are practically all farm lands, etc." Here we meet again 

 with the argument M'hich has been considered before, it is the same 

 argument which led to the clearing of the millions of acres of non- 

 agricultural lands abroad, it is the argument which prevented the people 

 of Pennsylvania from heeding the words of Penn, it is the same mis- 

 conception which left unheeded the good advice and proper beginning 

 of the Pilgrim fathers and which made people deaf to the pleadings 

 of the governor of New York two centuries ago. As has been stated, 

 the experience of Europe has proved it an error for those countries, 

 which after a thousand years of trial, are spending millions of dollars 

 every year to correct the evils brought about by this error. The experi- 

 ence of all our older states has proved the notion in error for those 

 states, they have paid a costly fine for their error and they are just 

 beginning to correct its bad effects. Nor is this all, the American 



