PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 29 



The Americans have been as careless over their forests as the 

 Australians. They have experimented in destruction on the 

 same large scale, and from the views expressed in the Forest 

 Congress we can learn large lessons from their experience. 



First as to the connection of the forests with natural and 

 artificial irrigation. Probably the total amount of rainfall in 

 Australia is determined by other factors. But the distribution 

 of that rainfall, its retention in the soil, is mainly determined 

 by the existence of forests. The Hon. James Wilson, Secretary 

 for Agriculture, said : " Forestry and irrigation go hand in hand 

 in the agricultural development of the West. The West must 

 have water, and that in a sure and permanent supply. Unless 

 we practise forestry in the mountain forests of the West, the 

 expenditure under the national irrigation law will be fruitless, 

 and the wise policy of the Government in the agricultural 

 development of the arid regions will utterly fail. The relations 

 in the arid regions between the area under forest and the area 

 in farms will always be constant. We can maintain the present 

 water supply of the West by the protection of existing forests. 

 In exactly the same way we can increase this supply by the 

 foresting of denuded watersheds. The full development of the 

 irrigation policy requires more than the protection of existing 

 forests — it demands their extension also." Surely this shows to 

 us the wisdom of maintaining our forests about the heads of the 

 eastern rivers for the sake of agriculture in the valley flats, and 

 the possibility of increasing the irrigation of the great plains by 

 afforesting the western slopes of the Divide around the heads of 

 the tributaries of the Darling. 



Again, the Hon. John F. Lacey, Representative in Congress 

 from Iowa, said : " I was born in the woods of Virginia. I 

 moved to the prairies, and one of the most unpleasant things of 

 my subsequent life was to return to the woods of Virginia and 

 find that the old streams and the holes we used to swim in and 

 where we used to go fishing are now gravelly roads. They are 

 highways as dry, as arid, as one of the deserts of Arizona or 

 New Mexico. Why is if? Because the trees have been cut 



