Congress has given to the Secretary of Agriculture, acting through the Forest Service, the specific task of administering the National Forests, with full power to perform it, and has provided that he “may make such rules and regulations and establish such service as will ensure the objects of said reservations, namely, to regulate their occupancy and use and to preserve the forests thereon from destruction.”  Every exercise of the powers granted to the Secretary of Agriculture by statute has been in accordance with the principles laid down by Chief Justice Marshall ninety years ago in the case of McCulloch vs.  Maryland (4 Wheat., 421), when he said as to powers delegated by the Federal Constitution to Congress: 

“Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional.”

After the transfer of the National Forests from the Interior Department to the Forest Service in 1905, some things were done that had never been done before, such as initiating Government control over water-power monopoly in the National Forests, giving preference to the public over commercial corporations in the use of the Forests, and trying to help the small man make a living rather than the big man make a profit (but always with the effort to be just to both).  Always and everywhere we have set the public welfare above the advantage of the special interests.

Because it did these things the Forest Service has made enemies, of some of whom it is justly proud.  It has been easy for these enemies to raise the cry of illegality, novelty, and excess of zeal.  But in every instance the Service has been fortified either by express statutes, or by decisions of the Supreme Court and other courts, of the Secretary of the Interior, of the Comptroller, or the Attorney-General, or by general principles of law which are beyond dispute.  If there is novelty, it consists simply in the way these statutes, decisions, and principles have been used to protect the public.  The law officers of the Forest Service have had the Nation for their client, and they are proud to work as zealously for the public as they would in private practice for a fee.

So I think the ghost of illegality in the Forest Service may fairly be laid at rest.  But it is not the only one which is clouding the issues of conservation in the public mind.  Another misconception is that the friends of conservation are trying to prevent the development of water power by private capital.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The friends of conservation were the first to call public attention to the enormous saving to the Nation which follows the substitution of the power of falling water, which is constantly renewed, for our coal, which can