the boldness of the action fully justified itself."

The work of reclamation was first prosecuted under the United States
Geological Survey; but in the spring of 1908 the United States
Reclamation Service was established to carry it on, under the direction
of Mr. Newell, to whom the inception of the plan was due. Roosevelt paid
a fine and well-deserved tribute to the man who originated and carried
through this great national achievement when he said that "Newell's
single-minded devotion to this great task, the constructive imagination
which enabled him to conceive it, and the executive power and high
character through which he and his assistant, Arthur P. Davis, built up
a model service--all these made him a model servant. The final proof of
his merit is supplied by the character and records of the men who later
assailed him."

The assault to which Roosevelt thus refers was the inevitable aftermath
of great accomplishment. Reclamation was popular, when it was proposed,
while it was being carried out, and when the water began to flow in the
ditches, making new lands of fertile abundance for settlers and farmers.
But the reaction of unpopularity came the minute the beneficiaries
had to begin to pay for the benefits received. Then arose a concerted
movement for the repudiation of the obligation of the settlers to repay
the Government for what had been spent to reclaim the land. The baser
part of human nature always seeks a scapegoat; and it might naturally
be expected that the repudiators and their supporters should concentrate
their attacks upon the head of the Reclamation Service, to whose
outstanding ability and continuous labor they owed that for which they
were now unwilling to pay. But no attack, not even the adverse report
of an ill-humored congressional committee, can alter the fact of
the tremendous service that Newell and his loyal associates in the
Reclamation Service did for the nation and the people of the United
States. By 1915 reclamation had added to the arable land of the country
a million and a quarter acres, of which nearly eight hundred thousand
acres were already "under water," and largely under tillage, producing
yearly more than eighteen million dollars' worth of crops.

When Roosevelt became President there was a Bureau of Forestry in the
Department of Agriculture, but it was a body entrusted with merely the
study of forestry problems and principles. It contained all the trained
foresters in the