FORESTRY BUREAU. 



159 



winter and to suspend the operations of the saw-mills for a certain portion 

 of the milling seas >n. Bat it seems impossible to secure such an agree- 

 ment. Personal greed and personal necessity appear to be too strong 

 to be overcome by any consideration of general or remote advantage, and 

 the work of destroying our forests seems likely to go on with constantly 

 increasing rapidity until we suffer, not only from the scarcity of lumber, 

 which is so important, not to say indispensable, for so many of the arts 

 and industries of civilized life, but, as the result of stripping the forest- 

 covering from the hill-sides and from the borders of our streams, we 

 bring upon ourselves floods and droughts and other evils more severe 

 than we have yet known. 



European countries have been engaged, some of them for a century 

 or more, in efforts to check the evil consequences which have followed 

 the destruction of their forests and to restore, if possible, the condition 

 of things which existed before that destruction took place. It is a tedi- 

 ous and costly work. Great expenditures of money have been neces- 

 sary, and only by slow degrees have those countries been even partially 

 reclaimed, and it is only by the constant intervention and exercise of 

 the Governmental authority that the improvement secured from time to 

 time is maintained and that the former destructive operations are not 

 resumed, and the people again threatened with the calamities from which 

 they formerly suffered. 



NEED OF GOVERNMENT ACTION. 



Since, therefore, the considerations of individual self-interest are not, 

 as they never have been, sufficient to regulate this matter, there is all 

 the more reason for the action of the Government in regard to the sub- 

 ject. In proportion as, in the freedom of individual action, less restrained 

 here than it is in European countries, many are engaged in destroying 

 the forests which are the property of private owners, ought the Gov- 

 ernment to act promptly and efficiently for the preservation of the 

 forests which still belong to the nation. These are now being wasted. 

 For a long time they have been regarded as lawful plunder, and un- 

 scrupulous persons have enriched themselves by cutting the trees and 

 disposing of them in the market or using them for their private pur- 

 poses. Hundreds of miles of Mexican railway, it is said, were con- 

 structed of ties cut on the public lands of Arizona, for which no permis- 

 sion was granted and no payment received. The Government has been 

 very lenient in its treatment of these despoilers, as it has been liberal 

 also in permitting settlers in the vicinity of its forests to make use of 

 them for their actual needs. This liberality has been taken advantage 

 of unwarrantably. The time has come for the Government to adopt a 

 different course of action from that which has hitherto characterized it. 

 While it may still be liberal, it should also be just to itself and to the 

 country. The forests are a trust which the Government holds for the 

 general benefit. It has no right to allow them to be squandered or to 

 suffer their value to be lessened by individual encroachments. It should 

 be as prompt to arrest and punish the theft of its timber as to arrest 

 and punish the one who violates its revenue laws. A fraudulent entry 

 at the land office ought to be visited with punishment as swiftly and as 

 surely as a fraudulent entry at the custom-house. In our wide domain 

 there is no such demand for land for agricultural purposes as makes it 

 necessary to dispose of any of our timber lands that they may be de- 

 prived of their forest-covering and so prepared for tillage. The prairie 

 and other arable lands now open for sale, and the timber lands of private 



