who grows up loving the outdoor world, bathing in its sunshine, playing in its sylvan haunts, is going to keep some of that sunshine for the drudgery of his after life; and it is a question if any thing he learns from school discipline will stand him in as good stead during stress as the unconscious lessons learned in gladness in the great out-of-doors. Indiana is to be congratulated.

Because of the clause in the Sundry Civil Bill of March 4, the National Conservation Commission cannot proceed with

its work; but the progress of the Conservation work under the authority of Congress and with the sanction of the President is not in any way prevented. The Commission itself—says Mr. Pinchot, the Chairman-continues. The President has agreed to ask Congress for an appropriation for the use of the Conservation Commission. In the meantime the work is to be carried forward by the Committee on Co-operation, established last December by the joint conferences of the governors, States and national commissions. An outline of a definite plan will be issued shortly from Washington.

The people must be informed as to the condition of our natural resources, and be roused to the necessity of saving them. This can be brought about by a general discussion in the periodicals, before societies of many kinds, and by direct publicity work of the different branches of the Conservation Commission itself.

Having informed the people and roused them to the necessity of saving our resources, we must then begin the actual work of saving them. There are two general lines of salvation: We must impress the individual man with the importance of saving his soil fertility, his forests, and whatever other natural resource he may have the disposition of; we must then force corporations, monopolies, and other organized interests by means of laws to respect the rights of the people.

These concrete results are to be brought about very largely by the operations of the conservation commissions or committees in the various States, and also by the already established societies that may take up the work. The colleges of agriculture and the experiment stations will also contribute greatly to accomplish the results. It is a part of all good agricultural teaching to

impress on the student the necessity of using no more of any of his natural resources than he finds it really necessary to use, thereby wasting nothing and saving much for the coming generation. It is not only or merely a question of saving the fertility of his farm or the timber of his forest, but it is the developing in the individual of a new sense of responsibility to his fellow man and to posterity. Every college of agriculture is naturally an organism for the proper controlling and utilization of our natural resources, for it places great emphasis on the necessity of the most careful saving of soil fertility, timber supplies, water power, wind power, human labor, and all other agencies, forces and materials that may be at his command, including, also, the conservation of his own health. The movement for the conservation of our natural resources, therefore, should result in the redirection of our point of view on life.

You ask how the work can be brought down to earth. I reply that it is already brought down to earth in the practice of all good farmers, good foresters, good miners, and others; but we need a general propaganda of publicity in order to bring all

others into the same mode of action and so to impress the whole movement on the public mind that it becomes action.

There should be a nationalized system of extension work emanating from the chain of Land Grant colleges established by Congress, whereby an energized publicity movement may be set on foot all over the

country for the purpose of rousing the people to the necessity of bettering their conditions; and there should be the organization of a general campaign for rural progress through the federation of all existing agencies that stand for better country conditions. What we need now very much is an organized movement.

Politics and by President Mell,

There should be a thorough organization of all the best forces of mind, heart and hand of the American people to bring about the careful husbanding of the varied natural resources of this great nation. The general government and the States should unite on some well-devised plan for the accomplishment of this much desired

end.

A comprehensive, systematic plan, based on good engineering and business principles can be thought out by a carefully selected commission composed of the leading Hydraulic, Civil, Mining and Mechanical Engineers and Geologists of America, with a sufficient number of leading successful business men to give the body a business balance.

This Commission should be kept out of politics, and to accomplish this end I would suggest that Congress pass a law authorizing its existence, making the necessary appropriations for the salaries and expenses, and leaving the appointment of the members in charge of the engineering and scientific societies.

If the preservation and the development of the natural resources and the water ways are placed in care of such a Commission, a working plan will be developed and the great wealth in forests, mines, water powers and water transportation will be conserved for the benefit of the citizens in this day and for many generations to come.

If the vast sums of money which have been used by Congress for the past fifty years in the so-called improvement of the small, insignificant streams could have been judiciously spent in the opening, straightening and improving the channels

Conservation

of Clemson College

of the great water courses of the United States, we would to-day have a splendid system of water ways for the commerce of the country. Shall we of this day make the mistake in relation to our manifest duty in carefully preserving the remnants of forests, and refuse to enact laws against their wasteful use?

There should be a systematic study made by observation and experiment, into the causes of great floods and preventive methods devised. What can be done to keep our great water ways open for traffic during long periods of drought? But so long as we as a people permit the wasteful and spasmodic expenditure of time and money. on the part of State and general governments in the solution of such problems, as the damaging influence of flood and droughts, we will continue to suffer, and our fertile lands will continue to be dumped into the ocean.

The States co-operating with the general government should look after the water pow ers lying undeveloped, and not permit private individuals to have unlimited control of this great source for national prosperity. The franchises granted under State or National laws, should be limited in time so that prosperity and happiness of the future population of this rapidly growing country may not be jeopardized. Of course the government should not interfere with the rights and liberties of the people, but it should certainly see to it that these water powers are properly controlled so that the entire people may reap the greatest benefit because of the care and protection of the water powers under the exercise of wise and not oppressive laws.

Public opinion is now very much alive to the importance of forestry. Yet there is a wide gap between the recognition that as a nation we need to protect our forests and actual enlightened care by each owner of woodland. The awakening of interest in the whole forest question has been extraordinary, but there still remains a great practical task in education which must be accomplished before we shall, as a people, be making the best use of our forest resources, and safeguarding ourselves against the evils of a timber shortage.

Our present area of woodland would be amply sufficient for our probable needs, if they were rightly handled. While much land that is now timbered will eventually be cleared for farming, in some regions we have cleared land which, under present conditions, would be better employed under forest. The practical problem is how to make our forest land fully useful.

Hitherto our progress toward the actual practice of forestry has been mainly through the public ownership of forests. It is plain that if we are to go any great distance beyond our present position, either we must embark on a far-reaching policy of buying land from the present owners, or the owners themselves must do the work. Private owners hold something like three-fourths of the forest area of the United States. Of this privately owned forest land rather less than half is in small holdings, or wood-lots, and rather more than half in large holdings. These two classes of holdings must be considered separately.

The large owner of timber lands is pretty sure to be a very wideawake business man. He is a capitalist, probably in the lumber business, and in any case keen to do the thing which will pay; in other words, he looks forward to getting his capital out again, sooner or later, rather than to tying it up permanently.

On this account, the average timberland owner is hard to interest in the kind of business proposition which the forester is prepared to lay before him. He is not

to be compared, for example, with the railroad builder. The latter is tying up capital in a permanent investment. Once in, the capital cannot be taken out again and put into something else; it can only be transferred to new holders or abandoned. But the lumberman is possessed with the idea, primarily, of turning timber into cash. All the traditions of his business are nomadic-to buy, cut, sell, and move on. Now, the very first thing that he will have to do in order to practice forestry, is to leave a part of his capital behind him as he cuts, in an investment which is tied up absolutely for a considerable term of years. Usually this does not look like good business to him—and largely because it is not his kind of business. By taking his money out now he will be sure of it. If he wishes to stay in the lumber business, he will buy a fresh tract. He does not worry about the time when there may be no fresh tracts to buy, for he will then put his money into some other form of property.

If, as business men, they prefer cash in hand to a long-term investment which they have carefully investigated, there is not much to be said except that they have a right to do as they please. Yet the public also has rights in the matter. If the lumberman does not want to practice forestry, he at least must recognize that in using his own property there must be some consideration for the interests of others. If his lumbering produces the fire danger to other forest property, or seriously affects stream-flow, or practically destroys for the community the value of the land itself as a source of wealth, he must expect to see measures looking to the regulation of his operations brought forward.

But how about the farmers, with their two hundred million acres or so of woodlots? They do not cut and move on. Most of them are going to hand their wood-lots to their successors, undiminished in size though depleted in quality. The average small holder stands in a very different case from that of the large holder. With him improvements in methods of rais

ing wood must be brought about exactly in the same way as improvements in methods of raising all kinds of field crops. Gradually it will come to be more and

more true, as it is now true in some degree, that a thrifty farmer will be known by the care and intelligence expended on his wood-lot.

The great cause for the depletion of our song birds, where it exists, is the backyard and farm cat. When we introduce such a perpetually hungry and inveterate hunter, nocturnal and diurnal, as the house cat, breed them by thousands and turn them loose on the world, we are really doing a serious injury to the bird life of the country. They are a gratuitously introduced force against which nature never intended the small birds to contend, and the balance has been entirely disturbed by their presence. Man has some restraint over every other domestic animal, but cats are turned plumb loose, to do as they please, and they are surely going to vastly reduce many species we cannot adequately protect, just as the mongoose has exterminated, actually, nearly all the species of ground-nesting birds in the West Indies

and other islands where it has been introduced and become feral. These woods and farm cats are just as wild, as lawless, and subsist all summer on birds and mice, with a strong preference for the former. As an example of the great mortality which may overtake a single species and still not materially affect it, Dr. Roberts, of Minneapolis, reports in The Auk, for October, 1907, that a sleet storm caught the Northgoing Lapland longspurs on their dense migrating flight, and killed them so that over a space some forty miles square they lay on the ground at an average distance of three feet apart. I think we may safely ignore the effect of the millinery demands for them. Cats and sparrows do more injury to them in a year than a century of such persecution as the trade now inflicts, which is, I am sure, practically nil.

The

"I have realized the lack of a definite dynamic scheme to carry into effect the great flood of talk we have had. I do believe that the publicity campaign of the last few years has been of enormous benefit and I am not sure that anything better can be done than to continue it. Forest Service reports that a greater percentage of the privately owned forests are now being handled conservatively and scientifically than ever before, and that this percentage is increasing year by year. That is encouraging, and it is due wholly

to the educational campaign that has been carried forward by OUTING and similar publications."

Senator Warren declares: "It is my belief that practical results in the matter of conservation could best be secured through federal legislative action. In this connection the Senate in organizing its committee for the Sixty-first Congress, has created at Committee on Natural Resources to which will be referred measures introduced in Congress pertaining to the subject.”

Says Dean W. R. Dodson of the Lou