region. To adjust and harmonize these diversified forms of 

 use so that all may go on at once without needless sacrifice 

 of one to another, and with preference for that of highest 

 public value where interests conflict, is the task which the 

 Government has undertaken. 



Unrestricted private ownership of mountainous forest 

 land risks the sacrifice of important public interests to indi- 

 vidual interests, waste and impairment of the resources, and, 

 in the end, widespread devastation. In the White Mountains 

 recognition of the public loss began nearly forty years ago. 

 The cutting of the virgin forests by lumbermen and the ravages 

 wrought by fire aroused inquiry for some method of protecting 

 the interests of the public. But it was not until 191 1 that 

 legislation authorizing protective measures was secured. In 

 that year Congress provided for the acquisition by the Gov- 

 ernment of lands whose control would ''promote or protect the 

 navigation of streams on whose watersheds they lie" — the 

 so-called Weeks Law. In accordance with this law, the Nation 

 is now purchasing the White Mountain land, but much of it 

 without the original stand of timber, and some of it so desolated 

 by fire that the restoration of timber growth can take place 

 only after the lapse of many years. 



Nevertheless, action came not too late to save the glory 

 of New England's finest mountains, for the present generation 

 and for all time. Scarred though their sides and summits 

 are by occasional disfiguring breaks in the forest mantle of 

 living green, dark-hued where the spruce and fir wrap the 

 upper slopes, emerald and vivid below the evergreen belt 

 where the hardwoods crowd into the conifers, they are still 

 to the eye much what they were a hundred years ago. 



Even then visitors had begun to pilgrimage into the 

 almost unbroken wilderness that stretched from the up- 

 lands of the Connecticut Valley to the Maine border and 

 from Winnipesaukee to Canada, to look upon the rugged 

 ''White Hills" in their lonely grandeur. These first pilgrims, 

 forerunners of the tens of thousands who each summer now 

 make the easy journey from point to point in luxury, found 

 rude accommodation in the occasional cabins of pioneer settlers. 



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