Part 14

I shall not pretend this afternoon to even describe to you the place of the forest in the life of any nation, and especially of its place in the United States. The great industries of agriculture, transportation, mining, grazing, and, of course, lumbering, are each one of them vitally and immediately dependent upon wood, water, or grass from the forest. The manufacturing industries, whether or not wood enters directly into their finished product, are scarcely, if at all, less dependent upon the forest than those whose connection with it is obvious and direct. Wood is an indispensable part of the material structure upon which civilization rests; and it is to be remembered always that the immense increase of the use of iron and substitutes for wood in many structures, while it has meant a relative decrease in the amount of wood used, has been accompanied by an absolute increase in the amount of wood used. More wood is used than ever before in our history. Thus, the consumption of wood in shipbuilding is far larger than it was before the discovery of the art of building iron ships, because vastly more ships are built. Larger supplies of building lumber are required, directly or indirectly, for use in the construction of the brick and stone structures of great modern cities than were consumed by the comparatively few and comparatively small wooden buildings in the earlier stages of these same cities. It is as sure as anything can be that we will see in the future a steadily increasing demand for wood in our manufacturing industries. There is one point I want to speak about in addition to the uses of the forest to which I have already alluded. Those of us who have lived on the great plains, who are acquainted with the conditions in parts of Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, know that wood forms an immensely portentous element in helping the farmer on these plains battle against his worst enemy—wind. The use of forests as windbreaks out on the plains, where the tree does not grow unless men help it, is of enormous importance, and, Mr. Wilson, among the many services performed by the public-spirited statesman who once occupied the position that you now hold, none was greater than what the late Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Morton, did in teaching, by actual example as well as by precept, the people of the treeless regions the immense advantage of the cultivation of trees. When wood, dead or alive, is demanded in so many ways, and when this demand will undoubtedly increase, it is a fair question, then, whether the vast demands of the future upon our forests are likely to be met. You are mighty poor Americans if your care for the well-being of this country is limited to hoping that that well-being will last out your own generation. No man, here or elsewhere, is entitled to call himself a decent citizen if he does not try to do his part toward seeing that our national policies are shaped for the advantage of our children and our children’s children. Our country, we have faith to believe, is only at the beginning of its growth. Unless the forests of the United States can be made ready to meet the vast demands which this growth will inevitably bring, commercial disaster, that means disaster to the whole country, is inevitable. The railroads must have ties, and the general opinion is that no efficient substitute for wood for this purpose has been devised. The miner must have timber or he can not operate his mine, and in very many cases the profit which mining yields is directly proportionate to the cost of timber supply. The farmer, East and West, must have timber for numberless uses on his farm, and he must be protected, by forest cover upon the headwaters of the streams he uses, against floods in the East, and the lack of water for irrigation in the West. The stockman must have fence posts, and very often he must have summer range for his stock in the national forest reserves. In a word, both the production of the great staples upon which our prosperity depends and their movement in commerce throughout the United States are inseparably dependent upon the existence of permanent and suitable supplies from the forest at a reasonable cost.

If the present rate of forest destruction is allowed to continue, with nothing to offset it, a timber famine in the future is inevitable. Fire, wasteful and destructive forms of lumbering, and the legitimate use, taken together, are destroying our forest resources far more rapidly than they are being replaced. It is difficult to imagine what such a timber famine would mean to our resources. And the period of recovery from the injuries which a timber famine would entail would be measured by the slow growth of the trees themselves. Remember that you can prevent such a timber famine occurring by wise action taken in time, but once the famine occurs there is no possible way of hurrying the growth of the trees necessary to relieve it. You have got to act in time or else the Nation would have to submit to prolonged suffering after it had become too late for forethought to avail. Fortunately, the remedy is a simple one, and your presence here to-day is a most encouraging sign that there will be such forethought. It is the great merit of the Department of Agriculture in the forest work that its efforts have been directed to enlist the sympathy and co-operation of the users of wood, water, and grass, and to show that forestry will and does pay, rather than to exhaust itself in the futile attempt to introduce conservative methods by any other means. I believe most emphatically in sentiment, but I want the sentiment to be put into co-operation with the business interests, and that is what is being done. The policy is one of helpfulness throughout, and never of hostility or coercion toward any legitimate interest whatsoever. In the very nature of things it can make little progress apart from you. Whatever it may be possible for the Government to accomplish, its work must ultimately fail unless your interest and support give it permanence and power. It is only as the producing and commercial interests of the country come to realize that they need to have trees growing up in the forest not less than they need the product of the trees cut down that we may hope to see the permanent prosperity of both safely secured.

This statement is true not only as to forests in private ownership, but as to the national forests as well. Unless the men from the West believe in forest preservation the Western forests can not be preserved. We here at the headquarters of the National Government recognize that absolutely. We believe, we know, that it is essential for the well-being of the people of the States of the great plains, the States of the Rockies, the States of the Pacific Slope, that the forests shall be preserved, and we know also that our belief will count for nothing unless the people of those States themselves wish to preserve the forests. If they do we can help materially; we can direct their efforts, but we can not save the forests unless they wish them to be saved.

I ask, with all the intensity that I am capable, that the men of the West will remember the sharp distinction I have just drawn between the man who skins the land and the man who develops the country. I am going to work with, and only with, the man who develops the country. I am against the land skinner every time. Our policy is consistent to give to every portion of the public domain its highest possible amount of use, and of course that can be given only through the hearty co-operation of the Western people. I would like to add one word as to the creation of a national forest service which I have recommended repeatedly in messages to Congress, and especially in my last. I wish to see all the forest work of the Government concentrated in the Department of Agriculture. It is folly to scatter such work, as I have said over and over again, and the policy which this Administration is trying to carry out through the creation of such a service is that of making the national forests more actively and more permanently useful to the people of the West, and I am heartily glad to know that the Western sentiment supports more and more vigorously the policy of setting aside national forests, the creation of a national forest service, and especially the policy of increasing the permanent usefulness of these forest lands to all who come in contact with them. With what is rapidly getting to be a practically unbroken sentiment in the West behind such a forest policy, with what is rapidly getting to be a practically unbroken support by the great stable interests behind the general policy of the conservative use of the forests, we have a right to feel that we have entered on an era of great and lasting progress. Only entered upon it; much, very much, remains to be done; and as in every other department of human activity our debt of gratitude will be due, not to the amiable but shortsighted optimist who thinks you have made a good beginning and the end may take care of itself; still less to the man who sits at one side and says how poorly the work is being done by those who are doing it; but to the men who try, each in his own place, practically to forward this great work. That is the type of man who is going to do the work, and it is because I believe that we have enlisted the active, practical sympathy of just that kind of man in this work that I believe the future of this policy to be bright and the permanence of our timber supplies more nearly assured than at any previous time in our history. To the men represented in this congress this great result is primarily due. In closing, I wish to thank you who are here, not merely for what you are doing in this particular movement, but for the fact that you are illustrating what I hope I may call the typically American method of meeting questions of great and vital importance to the Nation—the method of seeing whether the individuals particularly concerned can not by getting together and co-operating with the Government do infinitely more for themselves than it would be possible for any Government under the sun to do for them. I believe in the future of this movement, because I think you have the right combination of qualities—the quality of individual initiative, the quality of individual resourcefulness, combined with the quality that enables you to come together for mutual help, and having so come, to work with the Government; and I pledge you in the fullest measure the support of the Government in what you are doing.

SPEECH AT THE DINNER OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS, AT THE ARLINGTON HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 11, 1905

_Mr. President, Your Eminence, Gentlemen_:

It is a great pleasure to have the chance of coming here this evening and saying a word of greeting to a body of men who are engaged in doing work for this Republic which is to count, not merely in the present generation, but during the lifetimes of many generations to come. We hear a great deal said about true Americanism. Now the real American, the American whom it is worth while to call such, is the man whose belief in and work for America are not merely for the America of to-day, but for the America of the future.

It is a comparatively easy thing to do work when the reward is to come in the present; but every great nation that has ever existed on this globe has been great because its sons had in them the capacity to work for the well-being of generations yet unborn. Such a spirit is peculiarly necessary when the work that we desire to have done is essentially work of a non-remunerative type, non-remunerative in more than one way; non-remunerative in money, and it may be in fame. We do not know the names of the architects and builders of the great cathedrals whose magnificent beauty is an heirloom to civilization. We do not know the names of the builders of the great majority of the works to which every man with an aspiration after beauty naturally turns when he thinks of the past. We owe that beauty, we owe the elevation of thought, of mind and soul, that come with association and belief in it, to the fact that there were a sufficient number of men who worked in the spirit that Ruskin prayed for—the spirit of doing work not for the sake of the fee, but for the sake of the work itself.

There are things in a nation’s life more important than beauty; but beauty is very important. And in this Nation of ours, while there is very much in which we have succeeded marvelously, I do not think that if we look dispassionately at what we have done we will say that beauty has been exactly the strong point of the Nation. It rests largely with gatherings such as this, with the note that is set by men such as those I am addressing to-night, to determine whether or not this shall be true of the future. A very large percentage of the durable work, the work which is lasting, and therefore the beauty of which, if it exists, is also lasting, must be done by the Government. Many great buildings and beautiful buildings will be created by private effort; but many of the greatest buildings must necessarily be erected by the Government, national, State, or municipal. Those in control of any branch of that Government necessarily have but an ephemeral lease of power. Administration succeeds administration; Congress succeeds Congress; Legislature succeeds Legislature; and even if all of the administrations, all of the Congresses, are actuated (a not necessarily probable supposition) by an artistic spirit, it would still remain true that there could not be coherence in their work if they had to rely on themselves alone. The best thing that any administration, that any executive department of the Government, can do—and if I may venture to make any suggestion to the co-ordinate branch, Senator Cockrell, I would say that the best thing that any elective legislative body could do—is in these matters to surrender itself, within reasonable limits, to the guidance of those who really do know what they are talking about. The only way in which we can hope to have worthy artistic work done for the Nation or for a State or for a municipality, is by having such a growth of popular sentiment as will render it incumbent upon successive administrations, successive legislative bodies, to carry out steadily a plan chosen for them, worked out for them by such a body of men as that gathered here this evening. What I have said does not mean that we shall here in Washington, for instance, go into immediate and extravagant expenditures on public buildings. All that it means is that, whenever hereafter a public building is provided for and erected, it should be erected in accordance with a carefully thought out plan adopted long before; and that it should be not only beautiful in itself, but fitting in its relations to the whole scheme of the public buildings, the parks, the drives of the District.

Working through municipal commissions, very great progress has already been made in rendering more beautiful our cities, from New York to San Francisco. An incredible amount remains to be done. But a beginning has been made, and now I most earnestly hope that in the National Capital a better beginning will be made than anywhere else, and that can be made only by utilizing to the fullest degree the thought and the disinterested effort of the architects, the artists, the men of art, who stand foremost in their professions here in the United States, and who ask no other reward than the reward of feeling that they have done their full part to make as beautiful as it should be the capital city of the great Republic.

ADDRESS AT LUTHER PLACE MEMORIAL CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 29, 1905

DR. BUTLER:

It is a great pleasure to meet with you this morning and say a word of greeting on the occasion of the rededication of this church, coming as it does almost simultaneously with the entry of your pastor into his eightieth year.

From the standpoint from which I am obliged so continually to look at matters, there is a peculiar function to be played by the great Lutheran Church in the United States of America. This is a Church which had its rise to power in, and, until it emigrated to this side of the water, had always had its fullest development in the two great races of Northern and Northern Middle Europe—the German and the Scandinavian. The Lutheran Church came to the territory which is now the United States very shortly after the first permanent settlements were made within our limits; for when the earliest settlers came to dwell around the mouth of the Delaware they brought the Lutheran worship with them, and so with the earliest German settlers who came to Pennsylvania and afterward to New York and the mountainous region in the western part of Virginia and the States south of it. From that day to this the history of the growth in population of this Nation has consisted largely, in some respects mainly, of the arrival of successive waves of newcomers to our shores; and the prime duty of those already in the land is to see that their own progress and development are shared by these newcomers. It is a serious and dangerous thing for any man to tear loose from the soil, from the religion in which he and his forbears have taken root, and to be transplanted into a new land. He should receive all possible aid in the new land; and the aid can be tendered him most effectively by those who can appeal to him on the ground of spiritual kinship. Therefore the Lutheran Church can do most in helping upward and onward so many of the newcomers to our shores; and it seems to me that it should be, I am tempted to say, wellnigh the prime duty of this Church to see that the immigrant, especially the immigrant of Lutheran faith from the Old World, whether he comes from Scandinavia or Germany, or whether he belonged to one of the Lutheran countries of Finland, or Hungary, or Austria, may be not suffered to drift off with no friendly hand extended to him out of all the church communion, away from all the influences that tend toward safeguarding and uplifting him, and that he find ready at hand in this country those eager to bring him into fellowship with the existing bodies. The Lutheran Church in this country is of very great power now numerically, and through the intelligence and thrift of its members, but it will grow steadily to even greater power. It is destined to be one of the two or three greatest and most important national churches in the United States; one of the two or three churches most distinctively American, most distinctively among the forces that are to tell for making this great country even greater in the future. Therefore a peculiar load of responsibility rests upon the members of this Church. It is an important thing for the people of this Nation to remember their rights, but it is an even more important thing for them to remember their duties. In the last analysis the work of statesmen and soldiers, the work of the public men, shall go for nothing if it is not based upon the spirit of Christianity working in the millions of homes throughout this country, so that there may be that social, that spiritual, that moral foundation without which no country can ever rise to permanent greatness. For material well-being, material prosperity, success in arts, in letters, great industrial triumphs, all of them and all of the structures raised thereon will be as evanescent as a dream if they do not rest on “the righteousness that exalteth a nation.”

Let me congratulate you and congratulate all of us that we live in a land and at a time when we accept it as natural that there should be an interdenominational service of thanksgiving, such a ceremony as is to take place this afternoon, in which the pastors of other churches join to congratulate themselves and you upon the rebuilding of this church. One of the constant problems of life is to try to cultivate breadth without shallowness, just as we want to try to cultivate depth without narrowness. It seems to me that thanksgiving with the combined earnestness, the liberty, of the great body of the pastors who, for our good fortune, are in the various churches of this country can be accepted as in a peculiar measure typifying the American spirit in religious thought; that for our good fortune those men have been able to combine fervor in doing the Lord’s work with charity toward their brethren who do it with certain differences in the non-essentials. The forces of evil are strong and mighty in this century and in this country as they are in other countries, as they have been in all the past centuries; and the people who sincerely wish to do the Lord’s work will find ample opportunity for all their labor in fighting the common enemy and in assuming toward their fellows of a different confession an attitude of generous rivalry in the effort to see how the most good can be done to our people as a whole.

I thank you for having given me the chance to speak to you this morning, to say a word of greeting to you and to wish you Godspeed with all my heart.

ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATING CLASS OF THE NAVAL ACADEMY AT ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND, JAN. 30, 1905

_Captain Brownson, Members of the Graduating Class, Governor Warfield, and to the other Midshipmen and their friends and kinsmen here gathered together_: