than across that tract.
There has been as yet no dispute with the government about an outlet for
any timber purchased on the Reserves; the contract for the timber always
including the proviso that the logging company shall have the right to
make and use such roads as are "necessary," and the company is the judge
of what is necessary in that line.

The counties in which Reserves are situated receive no taxes from the
government timber, or from the timber that is cut from the Reserves
until it is cut into lumber, but in lieu of this they receive a sop in
the form of "aid" in the construction of roads. In the aggregate this
aid looks large, but when compared with the amount of road work that the
people who could make their homes within what is now the Forest Reserves
could do, it is pitifully small and very much in the nature of the
"charity" that is handed out to the poor of the cities. It is the
inevitable result of a system of government that finds itself compelled
to keep watch and ward over its imbecile children.

So in devious ways of fraud, graft, coercion, and outright theft, the
bulk of the timber of the Northwest has been acquired by the lumber
trust at an average cost of less than twelve cents a thousand feet. In
the states of Washington and Oregon alone, the Northern Pacific and the
Southern Pacific railways, as allies of the Weyerhouser interests of St.
Paul, own nearly nine million acres of timber; the Weyerhouser group by
itself dominating altogether more than thirty million acres, or an area
almost equal to that of the state of Wisconsin. The timber owned by a
relatively small group of individuals is sufficient to yield enough
lumber to build a six-room house for every one of the twenty million
families in the United States.

Why then should conservation, or the threat of it, disturb the serenity
of the lumber trust? If the government permits the cutting of public
timber it increases the value of the trust holdings in multiplied ratio,
and if the government withdraws from public entry any portion of the
public lands, creating Forest Reserves, it adds marvelously to the value
of the trust logs in the water booms. Even forest fires in one portion
of these vast holdings serve but to send skyward the values in the
remaining parts, and by some strange freak of nature the timber of trust
competitors, like the "independent" and co-operative mills, seems to be
more inflammable than that of the "law-abiding" lumb