WHAT FORESTRY MEANS TO REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT. 



* * * You have made, by your coming [to this congress], a 

 meeting which is without parallel in the history of forestry. * * * 

 For the first time the great business and the forest interests of the 

 Nation have joined together, through delegates altogether worthy of 

 the organizations they represent, to consider their individual and 

 their common interests in the forest. This congress may well be 

 called a meeting of forest users, for that the users of the forest come 

 together to consider how best to combine use with preservation, is the 

 significant fact of the meeting, the fact full of powerful promise for 

 the forests of the future. 



* '^ * If the forest is destroyed it is only a question of a rela- 

 tively short time before the business interests suff-'r in consequence. 

 All of you know that there is opportunity in any new country for the 

 development of the type of temporary inhabitant whose idea is to 

 skin the country and go somewhere else. You all know, and especially 

 those of you from the West, the individual whose idea of develop- 

 ing the country is to cut every stick of timber off of it and then leave 

 a barren desert for the homemaker who comes in after him. That 

 man is a curse and not a blessing to the country. The prop of the 

 country must be the business man who intends so to run his business 

 that it will be profitable for his children after him. * * * I do 

 not in the least underrate the power of an awakened public opin- 

 ion; but in the final test it will be the attitude of the industries of 

 the country which more than anything else will determine whether 

 or not our forests are to be preserved. * * * This is true because 

 by far the greater part of all our forests must pass into the hands of 

 forest users, whether directly or through the Government, which 

 will continue to hold some of them, but only as trustee. The forest 

 is for use, and its users will decide its future. It was only a few years 

 ago that the practical lumberman felt that the forest expert was a 

 man who wished to see the forests preserved as bric-a-brac, and the 

 American business man was not prepared to do much from the bric- 



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