WAYS AND MEANS 255 



Parts of rural New England are now so overrun by summer people who 

 stay, with few exceptions, apart from the native life that it hardly seems like 

 rural New England there now, until frost. Good ! you may say; New England 

 like any other part of our country, can stand an infusion of outside views, 

 ways, impulses; and the mixture is likely to prove helpful. Perhaps, but 

 throughout New England in general, as elsewhere, communion between 

 hosts and paying guests is not invariably as free and friendly as we have 

 found it, on the whole, at forest camps. Camping out, people get together. 

 But when money comes into the equation, and the host collects, it's a trade, 

 and "The guest (or customer) is always right." 



The more money involved in the trade, speaking generally, the more 

 completely and definitely is the class line drawn. In the highest priced resorts 

 of New England, the southern Alleghenies, in Florida, in the Rockies, and 

 on the coast and desert, space, sun, and air are sold to the rich in the Euro- 

 pean manner, with urbane, frock-coated men at desks sending drilled, 

 uniformed American boys scampering, bowing, to answer bells and say, 

 "Sir." Most of them do not like the work, but they need the money. 



All this may be good business, but it has no place in the public forests. 

 Forest Service policy has been, and will be, so far as possible, to keep public 

 recreation inexpensive, democratic, natural. There is real need of this, not 

 only for the sake of the millions of people who have little or no money to 

 spend on recreation, but also as an offset to all the unnatural barriers which 

 rise between Americans when outdoor recreation is bought and sold. 



Among the great middle class, renting rooms in tourist homes, sitting on 

 the porch and talking with their hosts, or visiting around from cabin to cabin 

 at reasonably priced roadside cabin camps, the situation is, from the stand- 

 point of a maintained democracy, much healthier. The great and abrupt 

 expansion of the outdoor recreation business in this country, the growing 

 habit of "auto- tourism," the jostling together of people from Oregon, 

 Maine, Maryland, Illinois, Georgia, Florida, and Texas, has probably done 

 the American spirit of democratic unity a great deal more good than harm. 



The Recreation Business . . . Turn now for a little while to trade sta- 

 tistics, unsatisfying, incomplete, but definite: The American Automobile 



