, may it not be too
late, that the tall talk and highfalutin boastings of the politicians
and alien journalists in their midst do nothing to make two blades of
grass grow where one grew before.

Germany may not have solved this problem, indeed no nation which
offers undue legislative alleviation for human frailty will ever solve
it, but at least she has not shirked the problem, and presents for our
enlightenment a scheme in full and smooth working order.

In dealing with German problems it is fair to give examples where her
methods have been wholly and entirely successful. The man who does not
know one tree or shrub from another cannot travel in trains, motor-cars,
or afoot without remarking the neatness, symmetry, and the
flourishing condition of the forests. In these matters Germany so far
surpasses us that we may be said to be merely in a kindergarten stage
of development. As early as 1783 a German traveller, Johann David
Schoepf, was distressed to see the waste of valuable wood in America.
He tells of a furnace in New Jersey which exhausted a forest of nearly
20,000 acres in twelve to fifteen years, and goes on to prophesy the
grave danger to America unless coal is discovered and used instead of
wood.

The public forests in America contain about nine per cent. of
the total land area and about twenty-five per cent. of the forest area
of the country. In Germany the state owns about 40 per cent. of the
forests, and nearly 70 per cent. of the forest area is under state
control. The total forest area of the empire is 34,569,800 acres, and
two-thirds bear pine, larch, and red and white fir. In a recent year
the Federal States made a net profit of $38,250,000 from public lands
and forests, and the entire profit from the German forests was
estimated at $110,000,000. When one remembers that Germany is less
than the size of Texas, and that from her forests alone, in one year,
she received an income equal to more than one-tenth of our total
national expenditure for that same year, the fact of our childish
wastefulness is brought home to us, and makes a patriot feel that a
Gifford Pinchot should be given a free hand. I can only write of the
subject as one technically entirely ignorant, but that Germany is a
university of forestry is not only attested by the demand for her
teachers in India, and in America, and elsewhere in the world, but by
the condition of the forests themselves all over Germany, which no
traveller, from A