B. How shall we manage forest property so as to make it yield these benefits and ward off these evils? The questions arranged under our five heads have for more than a hundred years been exhaustively studied in Germany and France. Germany thinks that before a man is put in charge of the immense interests which center around her forests, he needs from ten to fourteen years of hard work and study after he has as much education as the average graduate of an American college. The science elaborated in these schools, and in the forests under the charge of their graduates, is embodied in a large, learned and rapidly growing literature. The application of these principles to any particular region must be learned upon the spot. For this purpose, one of the first things which our national and state governments should do is to establish in different parts of the country experiment stations connected with large tracts of land.
At these stations we could work out specific answers to the questions suggested under our second main division (B). It is plainly impossible in the limits of a single article to do more than give a hint of some of these practical questions. Not even the most expert German forester could give adequate answers until he had before him the results of years of experiment conducted in different parts of the country by able men. Even then such answers would fill many books.
The end aimed at in this paper has been reached, if the numerous readers of The Chautauquan get from it some distinct impression of the magnitude of the interests with which the science of forestry has to do, and of the pressing need that the American people begin at once, and in earnest, to protect, to improve, and to extend the forest estate which up to the present we have been so heedlessly wasting.
GOVERNMENT EMPLOYMENT FOR WOMEN.
BY MRS. PATTIE L. COLLINS.
Since the appearance of my first article on this subject, in the October number of The Chautauquan, I have received letters, asking further information, from New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I have tried to answer all of them, but to none could I return more than a brief, and I fear unsatisfactory reply. I therefore resume the subject in this public way, with the hope of furnishing full information to all who are interested.
My former article was much criticised by my friends, scarcely one of whom agreed with me entirely. Some said that my view of the Civil Service was an ideal one—as it should be, not as it is—and others that I wrote from the standpoint of a successful (!) woman. A person high in authority gave me food for reflection in the following inquiry: “Do you not think that in justice to those who wish to apply for examination, you ought to say how many have already successfully passed, for whom places can not be found?”