Another, and unusually plausible, form of attack, is to demand that all land not now bearing trees shall be thrown out of the National Forests.  For centuries forest fires have burned through the Western mountains, and much land thus deforested is scattered throughout the National Forests awaiting reforestation.  This land is not valuable for agriculture, and will contribute more to the general welfare under forest than in any other way.  To exclude it from the National Forests would be no more reasonable than it would be in a city to remove from taxation and municipal control every building lot not now covered by a house.  It would be no more reasonable than to condemn and take away from our farmers every acre of land that did not bear a crop last year, or to confiscate a man’s winter overcoat because he was not wearing it in July.  A generation in the life of a nation is no longer than a season in the life of a man.  With a fair chance we can and will reclothe these denuded mountains with forests, and we ask for that chance.

Still another attack, nearly successful two years ago, was an attempt to prevent the Forest Service from telling the people, through the press, what it is accomplishing for them, and how much this Nation needs the forests.  If the Forest Service can not tell what it is doing the time will come when there will be nothing to tell.  It is just as necessary for the people to know what is being done to help them as to know what is being done to hurt them.  Publicity is the essential and indispensable condition of clean and effective public service.

Since the Forest Service called public attention to the rapid absorption of the water-power sites and the threatening growth of a great water-power monopoly, the attacks upon it have increased with marked rapidity.  I anticipate that they will continue to do so.  Still greater opposition is promised in the near future.  There is but one protection—­an awakened and determined public opinion.  That is why I tell the facts.

CHAPTER XI

THE NEW PATRIOTISM

The people of the United States are on the verge of one of the great quiet decisions which determine national destinies.  Crises happen in peace as well as in war, and a peaceful crisis may be as vital and controlling as any that comes with national uprising and the clash of arms.  Such a crisis, at first uneventful and almost unperceived, is upon us now, and we are engaged in making the decision that is thus forced upon us.  And, so far as it has gone, our decision is largely wrong.  Fortunately it is not yet final.

The question we are deciding with so little consciousness of what it involves is this:  What shall we do with our natural resources?  Upon the final answer that we shall make to it hangs the success or failure of this Nation in accomplishing its manifest destiny.