es.

[Illustration: HERD OF SHEEP GRAZING UPON A NATIONAL FOREST. THE SHEEP
GRAZE IN LARGE BANDS AND VERY CLOSE TOGETHER, AND THE CUTTING ACTION OF
THE THOUSANDS OF HOOFS IS VERY INJURIOUS TO THE SOIL. FOR THIS REASON,
SHEEP-GRAZING IS ONLY ALLOWED ON CERTAIN AREAS OF THE NATIONAL FORESTS.]

_The Free Grass Question_

The range stockmen of to-day are in much the same position as the
reservation Indian. The tides of civilization, advancing from east and
west, have met and threaten to overwhelm them. Like the Indian they must
meet the new conditions with new methods. They must not, and need not,
be overwhelmed, but can be assimilated in the new order of things. The
day of free grass in the State of Texas came to an end twenty years ago.
The old-timers shook their heads and prophesied all sorts of dire
happenings to the State. To-day Texas has more cattle and sheep, and
better ones, too, than ever before, and they are still growing in
numbers.

A convention of stockmen was held at Denver in 1898, at which the
burning question was the then new plan of forest reserves. The sheep men
from Wyoming, Utah, and one or two other Western States, declared with a
bitterness born of conviction that if the government made any forest
reserves in their States it would mean the total annihilation of the
sheep industry there. To-day these States are plastered with national
forests, and each has three or four times as many sheep as it had ten
years ago.

There has arisen, of course, from the men who have used these government
lands without money and without price, a continuous cry that the grazing
fees the Forest Service collects are "illegal, unjust and double
taxation," The complaint, of course, will not bear analysis. The land
belongs, not to the stockmen, but to the whole people. Why should the
government give something to a stockman in Wyoming, that belongs equally
to a stockman in Ohio, who is raising live stock on private land, in
keen competition with Western free grass men?

The fees are scarcely illegal. If the government can sell one man one
hundred acres of public land, it certainly can sell another man the
grass and forage crop produced upon any portion of the public lands. One
is no more a case of merchandizing than the other. As for the double
taxation argument, that too is equally childish, because the grazing fee
is not a tax but the price of a commodity.

As a matter of fact, the government spends annually, in tr