to run 20,000,000 feet. Quarter sections have yielded net $20,000, $30,000 and more; but don't run away with the idea that the homesteader took in those returns. He didn't! A forest yielding those high returns is hard to conquer as adamant. The individual man might as well tackle the eternal rocks with a file as these trees with his individual muscle. They require gangs of muscle and strong machinery and whole trains of flat carsnot bob-sleighs and wagons-to haul them to market. Your homesteader who finds himself in this kind of a forest must either sell out to the big operator, or find himself in prison in a wilderness of wood, where his own unaided effort can never hew out roads and trails.

The prize quarter sections of the big timber country proved a stronger magnet to the land looter than gold or coal. It was so easy to get the dummy, then act as middleman towards the big oper

ator; and often, the looters did not even bother with a dummy. In Montana, the land loot very largely took the form of what is politely called "timber trespass." The big smelting companies use enormous quantities of timber. To obtain this, it was customary for them to contract with the small mill men and homesteaders to deliver so many million feet a year. Nothing wrong in that contract

-was there? But the small mill men and homesteaders would sit down on their own 160 acres, then instead of cutting from their own area, they cut all around outside, and delivered this stolen timber to the smelting company. The smelting company knew perfectly well what was being done, for they inserted in their contracts a clause providing they should not be liable to suits arising from the areas so cut. Roosevelt put a stop to this free-for-all grab by including these areas in the National forests, and in

spite of the saving clause, the smelting company has been compelled to pay a quarter of a million damages a year for these timber thefts.

Down in Colorado, the theft was worked slightly differently. The law allowed the homesteader to take windfall and dead timber from the Public Domain free; so the mill man would sit down on his homestead, set fire to a whole mountain slope of green timber, then saw himself into a millionaire from the timber killed by the fire which he had set. Stop was put to this profitable business, too, by including forested areas of the Public Domain in the National forest. In these two cases, Conservation becomes a very live sort of thing-a thing to be hated by the looters of the timber lands.

In certain areas of California, it is almost impossible to take washings from sand bars in any stream without finding minute particles of mineral. Whether the mineral is in paying quantities or not,

does not matter in the least. The finding of the specks constitutes a placer; so the land looter places blanket placer filings over the most valuable timbered areas. Over 260,000 acres of the most valuable timber in Plumas County were held on such titles. The case is now before the Department of the Interior. Think what this means! Suppose each 160 acres of this area is worth the minimum of $10,000. On placer title, there has been quietly appropriated from Public Domain $18,000,000 of timber. Here, too, Conservation is no longer a merely academic thing. It is a standard of right versus wrong. Round that standard, the fight must rally; and perhaps the hardest fight of all is not for the thing itself, but against the forces of slander and misrepresentation. If such titles as those placer claims were allowed to stand-the public would be literally fenced off 260,000 acres of its own by the theft.

Down in Oregon, they have looted the

public land in the name of roads, in the name of schools, in the name of Indian reserves, with a detail of manipulation which space forbids telling. Just one example if you examine a public highway map of Oregon, you will see three broad ribbons in red running across the state diagonally from northwest to southeast. They represent land grants of 2,000,000 acres in all for the construction of roads upon which work was never actually done. How was the trick rigged? Why the governor and his commissioners years ago loaded a buck board with champagne and chicken pie, drove a few miles out from the little frontier posts where the road was supposed to begin, had a picnic, and returned to the fort with the report the road had been

built and they had formally inspected it. The thing was a howling joke to Oregon. It would have taken that governor not days but months to traverse the wild country of a socalled road; and the roads have not been built to this day; but the land was patented and sold by the land looters to outside investors.

And the looting is not all in the past. It is going right on today in spite of National forests and Conservation; and it is going on under the cover of the law. As every one knows, land that is arable is open to homesteading in the National forests. No genuine homesteader is ever rejected; but who is to tell what is a genuine homesteader? Up in Washington, quarter sections of timber run in value all the way from $10,000 to $40,000. Your homesteader comes in and wants to locate a farm of heavy timber at a slant of an angle of 45 degrees. As a farm, this is ridiculous. As a timber chute, the location is perfect; but the man swears he wants that farm though it will take $300 an acre to clear it and the man hasn't 300 cents to his name. If the homesteader's application is rejected, some senator arises in his wrath at Washington and champions the rights of the poor settler-the citizen of this freefor-all republic. What he doesn't tell is -soon as this poor, poor settler of this free-for-all republic got his patent, he sold out at a song to some big lumbering company. What he doesn't tell isthat particular location acts as a cork up the entire canyon for all other locators, who must either stay corked or sell to the big interests at any price named. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands

of acres of priceless timber have been so obtained by the big interests in California, in Oregon, in Washington. One big Minneapolis firm alone obtained in California and Oregon 500,000 acres through dummy entrymen. Another obtained Another obtained 100,000 acres. These facts are known to every field officer. Why are the thefts not punished, as the theft of a scuttle of coal or a cord of wood by a poor man would be punished? Echo answerswhy? Why was Glavis dismissed for trying to stop a coal grab in Alaska? Why was Pollard dismissed for being Glavis' confidential man? Why were Glavis' two stenographers hurriedly

transferred from Seattle to Montana on pain of dismissal if they did not instantly report at the distant post? (I read the order sent to one of these stenographers, though she did not know it.) Echo answers-why?

What does it all mean? It means Conservation versus Anti-Conservation. The thing is no longer academic. It is now a fight, with both sides arrayed, arrayed in Congress, arrayed in Senate, arrayed in petty local politics; and strange as it may be to acknowledge it-it is a question which side will win. That can be decided only by the public. With which side will the public line up?

T

HERE is a wonderful, rapturous vision of perfect life in an ideal future, which Mr. Kipling has put into a poem. One of its phrases is "We shall paint for an age at a sitting and never grow tired at all." And whether we paint or write rapturous verses about it, or do something that is very much more prosaic, for a living, there isn't one of us who doesn't get a thrill out of that idea of never getting tired over it. Of course, Mr. Kipling doesn't believe that such a thing can happen to humans during their sojourn on this planet and he doesn't raise any immediate false hopes. Though men have had visions and dreamed dreams about that delectable condition, ever since Adam's hairy wrists grew weary with his first tilling outside the garden.

But the Germans were ever a hardy people. They have their poets also, and they paint, but some of their entirely prosaic, materialistic scientists occasionally dare as much as artists or bards in the way

of breaking into prophecy. Such a one is young Dr. W. Weichardt, private lecturer at the University of Erlangen, who says he has discovered the real nature of fatigue and has a cure for it that is going to put an end to that tired feeling, for good.

Of course he begins with a germ. That's were all things medical and some things moral are believed nowadays to get their start. He knew that nearly all if not quite the whole number of diseases are produced in our unsuspecting tissues by the entirely selfish business and social pursuits of one or another thoughtless microbe. He also knew-and now has learned a good deal more about it-that whenever a spirited member of the microbe family gets very busy he pro

duces a poison in his immediate

neighborhood that makes a lot of trouble till the organism produces an antidote or antitoxin to counteract it. So far, he was not ahead of the men who discovered the diphtheria and typhoid fever