undertaken by the Forest Service itself, as, for instance, the original plans proposed for the shelter-belt tree planting on the plains, though approving of the project in principle.

It was about a year ago that I first noticed a statement to the effect that the Forest Service had the strongest lobby of any governmental department. This statement was made in its record by a Congressman from Arkansas who had failed in his attempt to establish a national park out of some low-grade brush and forest land contained in the Ouchita National Forest. Some 3 weeks ago this statement was repeated in amplified form by Horace Albright, former Director of the National Park Service, who, in a public meeting, charged that the Forest Service had been chiefly instrumental through its lobby in blocking numerous worth-while proposals for the extension of national parks by transfer of national forest land to the Interior Department. Is it possible that these reiterated statements indicate a belief that measures of public interest can be passed or defeated only through the influences of lobbying, and that public opinion and public desires have nothing to do whatever with the case?

I have another explanation for this phenomenon based on an intimate study of the subject of conservation for the past 40 years. When through and because of the recommendation of officials of the Department of the Interior previous to 1905, the Forest Service was transferred from that Department to Agriculture, the great interests of the West, representing mining, lumbering, grazing, and irrigation, including water power, were extremely hostile to governmental control and interference. The Forest Service vigorously undertook to manage these resources in the public interest. In their 30 years' experience since 1905, they developed a fundamental principle of multiple use of land resources. Instead of setting aside individual tracts for a single use and excluding all other possible utilities, the Forest Service has sought successfully to work out plans whereby the maximum of all legitimate use could be obtained on these areas coordinately.

This heavy burden of responsibility, honestly undertaken, developed a capacity for administration which, in my opinion, is unequaled in any other Government Department. It is no easy thing to harmonize the conflicting interests of grazing with the reproduction of timber, of grazing with soil conservation and erosion, of grazing with the preservation of wild game, of forest production with cutting and marketing of timber, of recreation with all other use of natural resources and of many other possible combinations and coordinations. Yet this has been done, and done so successfully that as a direct result the public opinion of all classes of users in the West has veered from antagonism to solid, substantial support for the kind of administration represented by the United States Forest Service, yet when proposals for additions to national forests are presented to Congress by petition of resident landowners, stockmen, and industrialists, it is inevitably followed by the assertion that local officials of the Forest Service are directly responsible for the circulation of such petitions, a charge that in no instance has been true.

The Department of the Interior under Secretary Ickes has lately adopted the policy of refusing to accede to any such additions, regardless of the reasons thereof or of public sentiment and the first grazing district established under the Taylor Act consisted of an isolated

body of land on the Fremont National Forest surrounded on all sides by national forests and reservation, and containing 145,000,000 feet of yellow-pine timber.

There is no inherent reason why men once employed and with first-hand knowledge of Forest Service administration and efficiency or defects should remain enthusiastic supporters of these policies forever. If in their experience these policies were inefficient or harmful to the public interest such men would be the first to testify against the system. Yet by the testimony of the Secretary of the Interior, every man who has ever been employed by this organization becomes for the remainder of his life a supporter of its policies through thick and thin.

As to my lobbying activities, I have in the past 40 years appeared before congressional committees just twice, and once was on Thursday of last week before the Senate Committee on Public Lands on this bill. If the treatment accorded by department heads to private citizens seeking to testify before congressional committees is to be similar to the principles governing a Donnybrook Fair every time you see a head, hit it-then definition of the term "lobbyist" will have to be considerably broadened. If this be lobbying, make the most of it.

The Society of American Foresters' objection to this bill rests, first, upon the fact that it does not give the President the discretionary power which his high office demands. In fact, it gives him no power whatever to transfer any branch of the Department of the Interior to another department, though it may be quite possible that such transfers would be clearly in the public interest. The bill provides that no such transfers should be made except of such agencies as are not considered to have anything to do with conservation.

Our second objection to the proposed bill is that it seeks to duplicate in an excessive manner the fundamental funct on of conservation of organic resources which has so far been successfully administered by the Department of Agriculture, namely, the conservation of soil and the organic resources depending upon soil. The setting up in the Department of the Interior of such branches as the present Forest Service would in itself require duplication of scientific services now rendered to one-fourth of the entire forest area of the country in farm woodlets, together with expert services of forest entomologists, pathologists, soil experts and forest economists. I have for the past 27 years spent one-fourth of my time each year in the southern coastal plains. I know that the economic salvation of at least one-half of the farmers of that region is intimately connected with grazing and forestry Agriculture, forestry, and grazing form a trinity which cannot be disrupted without a definte disturbance of this economic relationship There are innumerable examples of the close relationship of natural forces originating in the soil and supported by the soil. It has been said that the recent dust storms are due to drought, yet there is evidence that in the times of the Forty-niners the drought was just as severe and the water table just as low as it has been in the present cycle. These dust storms are the result of the destruction of vegetation from the two sources of plowing up natural sod of the plains to grow surplus wheat and through putting twice as many cattle and sheep on an area as the ground can support.

In my experience, during the war, in the Southwest, I can testify that members of the Forest Service were only then beginning to grasp the fact that overgrazing was destroying the reproduction of pine trees over wide areas. They did not even then realize that it was also causing accelerated erosion with disastrous and permanent injury to soil, streams, and irrigation reservoirs. This discovery came very shortly thereafter due to the fact that these men were trained in observing natural phenomena and soon traced the effect to the cause.

The influences of overgrazing upon accelerated erosion is now so definitely proved in so many different places that individuals who dispute these findings must stand accused of ignorance of basic facts in connection with vegetative cover and its effect on controlling erosion. Yet in an address before the American Society of Civil Engineers at Yellowstone Park in the summer of 1932, printed in Civil Engineering for September 1932, entitled "The Rise and Fall of the Public Domain," Herman Stabler, Chief of the Conservation Division of the Department of the Interior said that

erosion is a fundamental process of land sculpture that has been continuous through the ages, with general results beneficial to mankind. It is an open question, even on a local and temporary outlook, whether erosion on the remaining public domain exerts an influence mainly detrimental or mainly beneficial to human activities. Widespread efforts to control erosion there would involve costs out of all proportion to the benefits derived. It is evidence that watershed protection presents not an important problem on the public domain.

In this view he was later supported by 4 other officials, 1 of whom was in the United States Land Office, and 3 with the Geological Survey.

How is the coordination of control over these closely welded elements to be secured and maintained? That the administration of organic natural resources must be conducted under a single coordinating unit is almost self-evident. The Department of the Interior claims jurisdiction over conservation. The evidence must therefore be examined carefully as to the justification of its proposition to make that Department in effect and in name a Department of Conservation and Works. I will deal only with organic resources. It is my belief, based upon experience covering the entire period of conservation activities, that the Department of the Interior has shown neither the comprehension of the problem involved nor the capacity for its administration. This fact was frankly recognized by the Department itself, previous to 1905. President Theodore Roosevelt spoke with the support and the backing of the officials of that Department in asking for and securing the transfer of the National Forests to the Department of Agriculture, where it could be properly administered by a scientific bureau dealing with organic resources. I can best illustrate this condition by referring to a point raised by the Senate Committee on Public Lands on July 11, 1935, which was that since administration was a matter of law it would therefore make no difference whether the Forest Service was in the Department of Agriculture or was transferred to the Department of the Interior. I wish to answer that point now.

Previous to the transfer of the National Forests to the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior had all the authority in law that the Department of Agriculture fell heir to. Yet no control of an effective character had been exercised over grazing. The

Department of Agriculture immediately instituted grazing permits and establish a system of fees, following this up over a 30-year period with a development of methods of administration which succeeded in the dual purpose of encouraging the grazing industry to the greatest possible extent and at the same time retaining a sufficiently strong control over grazing so as to prevent injury to other public interests and other use of the forest and grazing lands, and to preserve the basic resource of forage on which the industry is self-dependent. It was a fortunate thing that 80 million acres within these forests, most of it timbered, were yet capable of being grazed, for in this way alone during this period was it possible to demonstrate that a Government department was capable of harmonizing grazing use with the protection of public rights and interests.

One is within

And here let me interject a point regarding those 80 million acres of grazing lands now within the national forests. It has been frequently, and humorously, claimed that vast areas within these forests are basically grazing lands only, and should never have been included. As a matter of cold fact, there are but two such areas. the Tonto National Forest, and was so included as a protection to the Roosevelt Dam, for the reason that if it remained in the Department of the Interior, no method existed for controlling overgrazing or erosion, which might render the whole project worthless. The other is the Santa Rosa Division of the Humboldt National Forest in Nevada, set aside for watershed protection.

During the excursion of the Stanfield committee of the United States Senate in 1925, complaints of local residents were met by a direct offer by the Forest Service to restore this area to the public domain. Immediately these same residents entered so violent a protest against this proposal that it was not pressed. This result enabled certain individuals in public life to continue to quote the standing joke about an area in Nevada within a national forest that contains only two trees, one named Roosevelt and the other Pinchot. There are many millions of acres in the national forests that are within the pinon-juniper type. At one time much of this area was eliminated but that was before the value of this type for fuel, posts, and watershed protection was realized. The remaining portion of the 80,000,000 acres of grazing lands contains the most valuable timber in the West outside of the rain belt on the Pacific coast, namely, the western yellow pine, and is an outstanding example of multiple use for both timber and grazing. What is not so included consists of scattered mountain meadows, areas above timber line, and mesas formerly deforested by fire but now rapidly restocking. Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior, actuated solely by a desire to dispose of the entire remaining areas of the public domain, had secured the passage in 1916 of the 640-acre homestead bill on the false economic theory that a section of land was sufficient to support a family on grazing alone. Grazing conditions on the national forests became constantly better while the progressive destruction of this resource on the public domain continued, accompanied by the beginnings of erosion, which finally resulted in dust storms. Faced with the utter break-down of the 640-acre homestead law, which was making it impossible even for the stockmen to conduct grazing on a profitable economic basis, this Department finally accepted the principle of regulation, and the Taylor Grazing Act was passed.

Unfortunately, however, the accepted principle incorporated in this bill was that the control of grazing was an affair to be left in the hands of the stockmen themselves who had, under the provisions, the power to determine the number of stock which shall be grazed. Under such control it is practically impossible to reduce the number of stock as has been done on the national forests or to extend any protection whatever against overgrazing and soil destruction. The principle of advisory boards first adopted by the Forest Service and held by them subordinate to public interest and authority has been under this bill made paramount.

As a matter of historical record the provisions of this Taylor Act were originally drawn by the Forest Service in an effort to extend to the Department of the Interior the benefit of its 30 years' experience in formulating policies that would be fair to the stockman, while at the same time protecting public interests. In the hands of officials of the Department of the Interior these safeguards rapidly evaporated. This situation was then called to the attention of Secretary Ickes, who forcefully assured the Department of Agriculture that he would see to it that the situation was corrected. Yet when the bill finally passed, the same jokers had been put back in it against which he had protested. This episode throws some light on the attitude of conservationists toward a department whose personnel, in the long run, dominate its policies regardless of secretaries.

One of the ancient land laws concerned the stone and timber claims that permitted the acquisition, by cash purchase, of land bearing stone and timber. The law set a minimum price of $2.50 an acre. Many years afterward, under pressure of outside conservation interests, it was legally determined that this price was in fact not the maximum but the minimum, yet the interpretation of this law had been consistently to sell valuable timber and dispose of resources of enormous value for the price mentioned. This law is still on the statute books and has not been repealed.

In the case of the Northern Pacific land grant claims, the legal provisions applying to these grants were subjected to administrative interpretation by the Department of the Interior, which ruled that 3,900,000 acres of land must be granted to the railroad in satisfaction of claims under land grants. The railroads insisted that these claims must be satisfied by selecting lands within the national forests of Idaho and Montana. This claim was fought by the Department of Agriculture, resulting, first, in a reduction by the Department of the Interior of some 1,261,000 acres in the so-called "deficiency ", and, finally, in findings by the Department of Justice to the effect that not only did no deficiency exist in the grants but that the company had already received approximately 5,000,000 acres of public land which it had not earned and was not entitled to. Final decision is pending in the courts. Meanwhile this raid on the national forests has been frustrated, but in defiance of and not by the aid of the Department of the Interior.

In the case of mining claims, it is recognized by all foresters that the extraction of minerals constitutes the highest use in priority of any land within the national forests. Every encouragement is given throughout these areas to the development of prospects. Unfortunately, however, the patenting of a claim establishes a private title within these public reservations. Innumerable cases have arisen