of reducing
their bad effects than for a man to make allowance for his own state of
mind. He who can stand off and look at himself impartially, realizing
that he will not feel to-morrow as he feels to-day, has a powerful
weapon against the temporary discouragements which are necessarily met
in any work that is really worth while. Progress is always in spirals,
and there is always a good time coming. There is nothing so fatal to
good work as that flabby spirit under which some weak men try to hide
their inefficiency--the spirit of "What's the use?"

It has been the experience of every Forester, as he goes about the
country, to be told that a certain mountain is impassable, that a
certain trail can not be travelled, that a certain stream can not be
crossed, and to find that mountain, trail, and stream can all be passed
with little serious difficulty by a man who is willing to try. Most
things said to be impossible are so only in the mind of the man whose
timidity or inertness keeps him from making the attempt. The whole story
of the establishment and growth of the United States Forest Service is a
story of the doing of things which the men who did them were warned in
advance would be impossible. Usually the thing which "can't be done" is
well worth trying.

Perhaps I ought to add that I am not urging the young Forester to
disregard local public opinion without the best of reasons, or to rush
his horse blindly into the ford of a swollen stream. Good sense is the
first condition of success. I am merely saying that in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred, when a thing ought to be done it can be done, if the
effort is made with that idea in mind.

All this is but one way of saying that the Forester should be his own
severest taskmaster. The Forester must keep himself up to his own work.
In no other profession, to my knowledge, is a man thrown so completely
on his own responsibility. The Forester often leads an isolated life for
weeks or months at a time, seeing the men under whom he works only at
distant intervals. Because he is so much his own master, the
responsibility which rests upon him is peculiarly his own, and must be
met out of the resources within himself.

The training of a Forester should lead him to be practical in the right
sense of that word, which emphatically is not the sense of abandoning
standards of work or conduct in order to get immediate results. The
"practical" men with whom the Forester must do his