FOREST A N I) STREAM 
064 
What of the Future? 
T HE population of the United States is now 
in excess of one hundred million people. 
The waste lands and the forests are 
shrinking before the mighty onflow of our civ¬ 
ilization, and even our lakes and rivers are 
losing their one time pristine wildness. Evade 
the fact as we may, the day of free shooting, 
free fishing, at least as the terms were under¬ 
stood in pioneer days, are coming to an end; 
first, because the open territory is being preempt¬ 
ed for settlement, and second, and corollary to 
the first, the supply of game and fish is decreas¬ 
ing despite the best efforts to maintain it. 
Nevertheless the day should never come when 
it can be said that there is no game left in this 
country. The intelligent efforts of the game de¬ 
partments'of the different states will be re¬ 
doubled in'the future, and so far from the feeling 
of resentment which our people may have held in 
the past against seemingly needless restrictions 
on their rights to shoot and fish, we believe that 
every intelligent sportsman will co-operate with 
his state authorities to keep for future' genera¬ 
tions some reminder of our wild life and fauna. 
Perhaps one solution will be the organization 
of sportsmen’s associations and clubs with more 
or less restrictive rights over certain territories. 
We do not mean that this will lead to class priv¬ 
ileges such as exist in England, but rather a co¬ 
operate effort by sportsmen to see that in certain 
areas under their control, indiscriminate slaugh¬ 
ter of game and the too free taking of fish may be 
prevented. If all the sportsmen in any state took 
this attitude there would be more hope for the 
future, but as all cannot be banded together, 
there certainly is nothing wrong in associations 
representing certain sections of a state, or for 
that matter associations of sportsmen all oyer 
the country with territory in any state, taking 
up the work. 
One thing is certain. The sportsmen of the 
United States have got to realize that unless they 
do some thinking and exercise reasonable re¬ 
straint, the grand outdoor sports of this country 
will come inevitably at an end. 
Effective Conservation Work 
S O much emphasis is placed by State Legis¬ 
latures and Forest, Fish and Game Com¬ 
missions upon the penalties for violations 
of the conservation laws that it is refreshing to 
find a commissioner who is tackling the difficult 
problem of forest fire prevention from the en¬ 
tirely divergent standpoint of the personal in¬ 
terest of the sportsmen in the preservation of the 
forests. Conservation Commissioner George D. 
Pratt of New York State believes that a large 
percentage of forest fires are due solely to heed¬ 
lessness. To overcome this heedlessness he be¬ 
lieves that it is necessary to “get under the skins” 
of the sportsmen, to so stir their imaginations 
and arouse their active co-operation that they 
will become real protectors of the forests, rather 
than their unwitting enemies. 
The design on the cover of forest and Stream 
this month shows one step in Commissioner 
Pratt’s campaign to appeal to the spirit of sports¬ 
manship in those who go into the woods. The 
true sportsman is not heedless intentionally. Un¬ 
fortunately, however, the handling of fire is so 
common—either in matches to light one’s pipe, 
or in the camp fires that are a part of the daily 
round—that the danger involved is often for¬ 
gotten. 
Two means are employed on a card just is¬ 
sued by the Conservation Commission to fix this 
danger in the minds of sportsmen and make it 
a part of their daily thought in the woods. The 
first is a quatrain written by Commissioner Pratt, 
telling in four easily remembered lines the story 
of a match carelessly dropped. A jingle sticks 
in the mind better than any statement of the law 
and its penalties, and the following verses, which 
tell of the transformation of the green forests 
to the blackened waste, are designed to be easily 
remembered: 
Only a man in a forest green, 
Only a match that was dropped unseen, 
Only a flame—some leaves and wood, 
And only a waste where the forest stood. 
The second means is pictorial. The story is 
visually told in a drawing by Walter King Stone, 
whose feeling for decorative landscape effects is 
well known to every reader of the current maga¬ 
zines. The moral in the panels showing the green 
wood, the man with his pack, the match that was 
dropped unseen, and the blackened tree trunks 
against the red glow of the passing fire, is un- 
escapable. 
Much educational work of this nature must be 
done before our forests are safe front the danger 
of carelessness on the part of those who are 
really their best friends. 
Is Wild Life Property? 
B EFORE the next issue of Forest and 
Stream is delivered to subscribers the 
Supreme Court of the United States may 
have passed on the constitutionality of the Mi¬ 
gratory Bird Law. Naturally any discussion as 
to the outcome of this vitally important legisla¬ 
tion is beside the mark, but it is pleasant to note 
that the regular work of the Department of 
Justice is being supplemented by briefs filed on 
the part of organizations and by individual at¬ 
torneys of eminence supporting the contention that 
the law is legal. One of the most interesting of 
these briefs is that which was submitted by 
Charles Stewart Davison, on behalf of the Boone 
and Crockett Club and the New York Zoological 
Society. 
Mr. Davison takes an entirely new and novel 
view of the question of wild life as state 
“property” and one that goes much further than 
the government attorneys. Is there a “property” 
in the United States in migratory wild animals? 
This it is held is a dangerous distincton to at¬ 
tempt to make, for there is apparently no basis 
on which to claim that the “property” of the 
several states at the time of the adoption of the 
Constitution in both migratory and non-migratory 
wild animals (which it is a necessary admission 
to make if the theory is to be sustained) passed 
to the United States of America under the terms 
of the Constitution. There has been some 
timidity in facing the real issue in the case be¬ 
cause the court in earlier cases committed itself 
to a position against the only theory on which 
the act can be sustained as constitutional: i. e. 
that there is no property in anyone in wild ani¬ 
mals- 
The question now raised has never heretofore 
stood for decision. Prior cases all related to 
wild animals after the killing —that is so far 
as the United States courts have been concerned. 
Anything which was said in earlier cases was 
not requisite for the purposes of those cases. 
The only difficulty now lies in the fact that in 
earlier cases careless expression and use of the 
word “property” did occur. But the finding that 
there was a “property,” in the strict sense of the 
word, in wild animals, either migratory or non- 
migratory in anyone whomsoever was not nec¬ 
essary to the decision of those cases. Thus so 
far as the question of before killing or capturing 
is concerned the road may be open for the true 
solution of the matter, and to follow the rules 
laid down and theories advanced by every text 
writer of authority. In other words the court 
may abandon a precedent based on illy considered 
or erroneous words at a time when the question 
now on trial was not involved in the cases 1 be¬ 
fore the court. 
The Boone and Crockett Club Plan 
W E do not know who labeled the present 
movement for the establishment of game 
refuges in our national forests as the 
“Hornaday” plan. Of a surety its chief ad¬ 
vocate may be exonerated, but in justice to the 
Boone and Crockett Club the plan should not 
take on a false title, for it is absolutely identical 
with the effort made by that organization in 
1912 to accomplish the same result. The Boone 
and Crockett Club plan would have been enacted 
as a law but for the fact that the measure be¬ 
came tangled in a mass of appropriation bills 
and therefore died in committee. The arguments 
advanced in its favor in 1912 holds good to an 
even greater extent now than then. 
In an editorial published in Forest and Stream 
on May 18, 1912, a strong stand was taken in 
favor of the Boone and Crockett bill. Among 
other things this paper said: 
Should this bill become a law, it will mark 
the greatest advance toward the substantial pre¬ 
servation of our rapidly disappearing big game 
that has ever been made. The possibility of its 
passage should give hope to those who have al¬ 
ready despaired of the saving of our magnificent 
big-game animals and should spur each one on 
to active support of the bill by writing to the 
Congressmen from his district. As a law the 
bill would make a new era in game protection. 
What was said then is still true. No matter 
by what name the bill get into Congress, every 
friend of game conservation should lend as¬ 
sistance in pushing it forward. 
Credit to Whom Credit is Due 
The cover design of the October Forest and 
Stream, showing a lifelike reproduction of a 
white mountain goat in its hatural surroundings, 
was the work of the well-known artist, Ernest 
Thompson Seton. The illustration was drawn 
for Forest and Stream, but through a typo¬ 
graphical error the artist’s name was omitted 
from the plate. It is only just and due to the 
talented artist and author that this announcement 
should be made through the columns of Forest 
and Stream. 
