Indians and wild beasts. Every day became an "Arbor Day, on which a youth was praised, not for planting, but for felling a tree." The woodman's axe was the symbol of progress.

Following the effort to reclaim the timber land for agriculture and homesteads, came the vast lumbering operations for domestic use and foreign exportation. Besides the destruction through axe and saw, has been the destruction of fire, until the forests have rapidly diminished, and we have now reached the point where their growth is but one-third of the annual cut; and at the present rate of use, all of the standing timber will be cut within twenty or thirty years. To what other land can we look for help? The government reports that Canada can not supply our deficiency, for she will need all her timber herself. Siberia can not supply us, for her timber is too far from water transportation. South America can not supply us, because much of the timber of that vast continent is of a different character from that we use, and ill adapted to our need. We must suffer because we have carelessly wasted our forests. It is impossible to repair the damage in time to escape much

Old way-Logs cut and left together, Lodgepole pine, Colorado

suffering, although it is not too late to work hard to reduce it as much as we can.

One great reason for the exhaustion of the nation's resources in land, and water, and trees, and mineral, is found in the fact that almost priceless possessions have been passed over from national to individual or corporation control. It is true that without this liberal giving on the part of the government, the development of the nation's resources would never have been so rapid, nor would this nation have come so surely to the forefront in commercial and industrial activity. All might have gone well had the beneficent laws, created for the people's good, been carried out according to their original intent; but individuals and corporations began to grab the government land, and through fraud secured possession of millions of acres which should have passed into the people's possession.

The great lumber, cattle, sheep, and mining companies obtained vast stretches of land by purchase from the railroads. To the State School lands and other lands, "lumber jacks," "squatters," and settlers honestly obtained a title and then sold to the companies. "Dum

mies" were also hired to take up land and turn it over to their employers; single companies in this way obtaining a million and more acres, thus coming to possess tremendous holdings which were originally intended for the benefit of the homesteader, and not for the enrichment of a few who were already rich beyond their need. How much greater would have been the wealth of this nation today if instead of these vast holdings of the land-kings, small farmers each tilling his 160 acres had secured the land as intended by the nation's laws.

The total grants made to railroad and other corporations as an inducement to open up new country in the far west, aggregate 266,000,000 acres, an area equal to France and Germany combined, which support a population greater than that of the United States.

The danger of all this lies not alone in the building up of a landed aristocracy nor even in the keeping of the people from the land, thus compelling them to crowd into the great cities, but in the temptation to skin the land secured at such little cost and use it up at once, thus exhausting all the resources which should have been conserved and developed. Other