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THIS PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UNRESTRICTED AND FOREST SERVICE LOGGING

The foreground has been cut over by a private concern and the timbered strip behind shows the area cut over by the Forest Service. This is in the Bitterroot National Forest, Montana,

order that he might run it better than you do, you would probably laugh at him, or send for the lunacy commission. If you acceded to his proposition, it is reasonably certain that the lunacy commission would get you before very long. Nevertheless and notwithstanding, crude as that procedure may seem when it is reduced to those simple terms, that is just what we are asked to do with the public domain-with those billions and hundreds of millions of the National Estate.

You are not inclined to believe me; and I don't blame you. The proposal that the whole remaining public domain be given away by a single act of Congress seems so exaggerated, so impossible, so luminously preposterous, that of course, unless your attention has been called to the imminence and seriousness of the proposition and the power that backs it, you will refuse to take it seriously.

Yet that very proposal is today backed by a great campaign in this country. Congress is being urged to cede to the

various States all the public lands within their borders, to be administered, used and disposed of by the States, as they may see fit.

Most of the public lands (Alaska excepted) are in the eleven western States

Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. These States have about 6,874,000 population, or 14.4 per cent of the population of the country. Today, these public lands belong to the people of all the States. The Nation is asked to turn them over to this 14.4 per cent of the present

owners.

This demand is made, not by the people of these eleven States, but by an array of private interests, which think they could get the lands away from the States more easily than from the Nation. The Nation has been aroused to realize what these lands are worth, what they mean to the future, what ought to be done with them. The Nation has squandered so much of its riches that it is

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TYPICAL DESERT SCENE IN YAKIMA VALLEY, WASHINGTON It is the National Government, not the States, that took the initiative in reclaiming areas like this.

getting rather less liberal. Therefore, it is proposed by the plunderers that we turn the lands over to the States; these would be more easily managed, more readily induced to part with their riches. It is so much easier to buy a Legislature than to corrupt a whole Congress and a National Administration! It is possible to frame up so many different kinds of pretexts, to insert so many different sorts of jokers, to control minor committees, to enlist officials in support of your "little bill", when you are handling a legislature!

When all that has been accomplished, who will at last own the empire that now is the public domain?

The Lumber Trust; The Oil Trust; The Steel Trust; The Coal Combination; The Fertilizer Trust: The Copper Trust; The Smelter Trust; The Railroads; The Water Power Trust; The cattle and sheep barons of the plains States; And, in general, the grasping, grabbing, grafting interests that are always looking out for their own profits, while the friends of the people are trying to convince the people that the plunderer's hand is in their pocket.

Already, these and other private interests have seized a large part of the cream of the public domain. But they are not satisfied. They never will be till the last

acre, the last stick of timber, the last mining prospect, the last water-power possibility, the last coal mine, the last deposit of coal or copper or what not, is in their possession.

Will these avid interests get what they demand? The best way to judge their prospect for the future, is to consider what measure of success has been meted to like enterprises in the past.

In the beginning, practically the whole of what is now this great country of forty-eight States, was public domain. There were vast areas of public land within the original thirteen States, owned by the States. State ownership of those lands did not prove successful, as, is proved by the fact that in those cases where the States reserved these lands, they were ultimately disposed of in wasteful, ill-considered, and extravagant manner. Some of the States, which in that early day squandered their public. lands, are today actually begging the Federal Government to buy back for them vast areas, and turn them into forest reserves. Half a score of eastern States, which originally owned vast areas of their own public lands, have within the last few years, by resolution of their legislatures or through their delegations in Congress, demanded that Congress should buy back, in part, the very lands

which the States squandered in order to make national forest reserves of them. If these States are now tardily discovering the need of forest areas, why do they not invoke the sovereignty and the revenues of the States to provide these forest reserves? Simply because experience has demonstrated that the States have not the administrative or scientific equipment or the necessary revenues to do this work. A few of them have experimented in this direction with the result that, probably, every one of them would. be glad to turn over its state forests to the administration of a strong federal authority.

The reason is perfectly plain. State lines do not bound problems of this sort. Nature laid out her forests, her watersheds, her mountain areas, and her vast plains, without thought of the artificial limitations that men might afterward impose. William Jennings Bryan, than whom there is no more ardent advocate of the proper and practical rights of the States, in a recent speech pointed out this conclusion He showed is no affair dition as State may water

with his wonted clarity. that the flow of streams of state lines. The conto forest stations in one affect the condition as to power and annual

floods in a State a thousand miles away. The immediate valley of the Mississippi is profoundly concerned with conditions that must be made for it in the far away regions that comprise the headwaters of the Ohio, the Missouri, and all the great tributaries of the "Father of Waters". The question, then, is obviously a national one; nay, a view broad enough to encompass its true situation would make it a continental question.

The impossibility of proper state administration of these problems is further indicated by the fact that in addition to the great areas of state-owned lands, which many of the States had from the beginning, the National Government has ceded directly to the States the tremendous total of 178,269,257 acres of public land; that is to say, 278,000 square miles or more than five and one-half times the area of Ohio. What have the States done with this imperial domain? For the greater part they have scattered it to the winds, getting nothing worth while for it, and today are knocking at the door of the National Congress, beseeching for federal aid to reclaim the vast holdings of swamp lands, that have been given to them on the understanding that they would be drained and made immensely valuable assets of the States owning them.

Very much the larger part of the federal lands that were given to the States were intended as endowments to the public school system and to the colleges of the State. The recklessness, the lavishness, the utter lack of consideration for a future generation, which marked the disposal of these school lands by the States, has been an affair of common scandal, in most of the public-land common-wealths for the last generation or two. It is worth while to particularize right here as to how the States squandered their public lands. The Commissioner of Cor

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porations, Mr. Luther Conant, Jr., in a very recent report shows, that "in northeastern California, out of 360,000 acres selected by the State under its various grants, almost two-thirds are now owned by large timber holders. Qne holder, Thomas B. Walker, has more than 125,000 acres; three others, together, have 65,000 acres. In Idaho, the State has sold the timber on large tracts to lumber companies, but has retained the fee. Those few suggestions, about public land administration in just one State, point to a conclusion (which will not be very erroneous), as to how the lumber trusts came into existence.

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Florida, with a total area of less than 35,000,000 acres, was given over 20,000,000 acres as swamp land. Up to 1910 it had managed to get rid of almost 19,000,000 acres, practically without real compensation. Yet much of the land thus amiably donated to whoever asked, was covered with the finest pine and cypress timber; and the power of the lumber monopoly today in the hands of one man, is a burden on the back of every citizen of Florida, for which he has to thank the public land policy of his own State.

Another natural resource of strictly national character, which was contained in the Florida public lands, was the great area of phosphate bearing rocks essential to the manufacture of commercial fertilizer. Florida has one of the greatest deposits of this rock known in the world. Not only did these fabulously valuable lands get away from the State's control without any real compensation, but a large part of them are today owned by

German investors and their products go to restore the agricultural lands of Germany instead of this country. The same is true, though to a less degree, of the great phosphate areas of the Carolinas and Tennessee.

Minnesota is one public-land State which realized what its public-land wealth meant to it before that public wealth was entirely lost. True, it was an eleventh hour conversion. Yet the administration of those fragments of public lands which were left to it when the awakening came, presents contrast with the profligacy of other States, that is most enlightening. Samuel G. Iverson, State Auditor of Minnesota, about a year ago declared that the State would receive more revenue from a certain 120 acres of swamp land containing ore, leased by the State for a royalty, than the States of Wisconsin and Michigan together received from the sale of all their public lands. This 120 acres is the Scranton Mine, near Hibbing, Minnesota, from which it is estimated that the state's royalty will ultimately reach $10,000,000. Concerning another section, of school land, Mr. Iverson says:

"The Minnesota school fund will receive more money from one section of school land, the Hill Iron Mine, than the States States of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, combined, have received or ever will receive from all the lands granted to them by Congress."

It should be understood that before Minnesota adopted its present enlightened policy of administering these public lands for the public interest, vastly the greater part of its wonderful wealth in land, timber, and iron ore, had been parted with, practically without substantial consideration. "In general," says Commissioner Conant, "the instances that have come to the bureau's knowledge suggest that, throughout the timbered areas, the land policy of the State has

40 BILLION FEET IS THE ANNUAL GROWTH

100 BILLION FEET IS THE ANNUAL CUT. INCLUDING CORDWOOD USED FOR FUEL

30 BILLION FEET IS THE AVERAGE ANNUAL FIRE Loss

AN UNKNOWN QUANTITY IS KILLED EACH YEAR BY INSECTS. BLIGHT. AVALANCHES, ETC.

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DESTRUCTIVE LUMBERING IN THE COAST REDWOOD BELT. EUREKA, HUMBOLDT CO., CAL.

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