Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 1 (of 7)

by Theodore Roosevelt

The forest problem is in many ways the most vital internal problem of the United States. The more closely this statement is examined the more evident its truth becomes. In the arid regions of the West agricultural prosperity depends first of all upon the available water supply. Forest protection alone can maintain the streamflow necessary for irrigation in the West and prevent floods destructive to agriculture and manufactures in the East. The relation between forests and the whole mineral industry is an extremely intimate one, for mines can not be developed without timber, and usually not without timber close at hand. In many regions of the West ore is more abundant than wood, and where the ore is of low grade, transportation of the necessary mine timbers from a distance is out of the question. The use of the mine is strictly limited to the man who has timber available close at hand. The very existence of lumbering, the fourth great industry of the United States, depends upon the success of your work and our work as a Nation in putting practical forestry into effective operation.

As it is with mining and lumbering, so it is in only less degree with transportation, manufacture, and commerce in general. The relation of all these industries to the forests is of the most intimate and dependent kind. It is a matter for congratulation that so many of these great interests are waking up to this fact. The railroads, especially, managed as they are by men who are obliged by the very nature of their profession to possess insight into the future, have awakened to a clearer realization of the vast importance of economical use both of timber and of forests. Even the grazing industry, as it is carried out in the great West, which might at first sight appear to have little relation to forestry, is nevertheless closely related to it, because great areas of winter range would be entirely useless without the summer range in the mountains, where the forest reserves lie.

The forest resources of our country are already seriously depleted. They can be renewed and maintained only by the co-operation of the forester and the lumberman. The most striking and encouraging fact in the forest situation is that lumbermen are realizing that practical lumbering and practical forestry are allies and not enemies, and that the future of each depends upon the other. The resolutions passed at the last great meeting of the representative lumber interests held here in Washington are strong proof of this fact and the most encouraging feature of the present situation. As long as we could not make the men concerned in the great lumbering industry realize that the foresters were endeavoring to work in their interests and not against them, the headway that could be made was but small. And we will be able to work effectively to bring about immediate results of permanent importance largely in proportion as we are able to convince the men at the head of that great business of the practical wisdom of what the foresters of the United States are seeking to accomplish. In the last analysis, the attitude of the lumbermen toward your work will be the chief factor of the success or failure of that work. In other words, gentlemen, I can not too often say to you, as indeed it can not be too often said to any body of men of high ideals and of scientific training who are endeavoring to accomplish work of real worth for the country, you must keep your ideals, and yet seek to realize them in practical ways.

The United States is exhausting its forest supplies far more rapidly than they are being produced. The situation is a grave one, and there is but one remedy. That remedy is the introduction of practical forestry on a large scale, and of course that is impossible without trained men; men trained in the closet and trained by actual field work, under practical conditions. You will have created a new profession; a profession of the highest importance; a profession of the highest usefulness toward the State; and you are in honor bound to yourselves and to the people to make your profession stand as high as the profession of law, as the profession of medicine, as any other profession most intimately connected with our highest and finest development as a nation. You are engaged in pioneer work in a calling whose opportunities for public service are very great. Treat the calling seriously; remember how much it means for the country as a whole; remember that if you do your work in crude fashion, if you only half learn your profession, you discredit it as well as yourselves. Give yourselves every chance by thorough and generous preparation and by acquiring not only a thorough knowledge, but a wide outlook over all the questions on which you have to touch. The profession which you have adopted is one which touches the Republic on almost every side, political, social, industrial, commercial; and to rise to its level you will need a wide acquaintance with the general life of the Nation, and a viewpoint both broad and high. Any profession which makes you deal with your fellowmen at large makes it necessary that, if you are to succeed, you should understand what these fellowmen are, and not merely what they are thought to be by people who live in the closet and the parlor. You must know who the men are with whom you are acting; how they feel; how far you can go; when you have to stop; when it is necessary to push on; you must know all of these things if you are going to do work of the highest value.

I believe that the foresters of the United States will create and apply a more effective system of forestry than we have yet seen. If you don’t, gentlemen, I will feel that you have fallen behind your brethren of other callings; and I don’t believe you will fall behind them. Nowhere else is the development of a country more closely bound up with the creation and execution of a judicious forest policy. This is of course especially true of the West; but it is true of the East also. Fortunately in the West we have been able relatively to the growth of the country to begin at an earlier day; so that we have been able to provide great forest reserves in the Rocky Mountains, instead of waiting and attempting to get Congress to pay a very large sum for their creation, as we are now endeavoring to do in the Southern Appalachians. In the administration of the national forest reserves, the introduction of conservative lumbering on the timber tract of the lumberman and the woodlot of the farmer, in the practical solution of forest problems which affect every industry and every activity of the nation, the members of this society have an unexampled field before them. You have heavy responsibilities—every man that does any work that is worth doing has a heavy responsibility—for upon the quality of your work the development of forestry in the United States and the protection of the industries which depend upon it will largely rest. You have made a good beginning, and I congratulate you upon it. Not only is a sound national forest policy coming rapidly into being, but the lumbermen of the country are proving their interest in forestry by practicing it. Twenty years ago a meeting such as this to-night would have been impossible, and the desires we hear expressed would have been treated as having no possible relation to practical life. I think, Mr. Secretary, that since you first came into Congress here there has been a complete revolution in the attitude of public men toward this question. We have reached a point where American foresters, trained in American forest schools, are attacking American forest problems with success. That is the way to meet the larger work you have before you. It is a work of peculiar difficulty, because precedents are lacking. It will demand training, steadiness, devotion, and above all esprit de corps, fealty to the body of which you are members, zeal to keep the practice as well as the ideals of that body high. The more harmoniously you work with each other, the better your work will be. And above all a condition precedent upon your usefulness to the body politic as a whole is the way in which you are able both to instil your own ideals into the mass of your fellowmen with whom you come in contact, and at the same time to show your ability to work in practical fashion with them; to convince them that as a business matter it will pay for them to co-operate with you; to convince the public of that, and then also so to convince the people of the localities, of the neighborhoods in which you work, and especially the lumbermen and all others who make their life trades dealing with the forests.

AT CHICAGO, ILL., APRIL 2, 1903

Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen:

To-day I wish to speak to you, not merely about the Monroe Doctrine, but about our entire position in the Western Hemisphere—a position so peculiar and predominant that out of it has grown the acceptance of the Monroe Doctrine as a cardinal feature of our foreign policy; and in particular I wish to point out what has been done during the lifetime of the last Congress to make good our position in accordance with this historic policy.

Ever since the time when we definitely extended our boundaries westward to the Pacific and southward to the Gulf, since the time when the old Spanish and Portuguese colonies to the south of us asserted their independence, our Nation has insisted that because of its primacy in strength among the nations of the Western Hemisphere it has certain duties and responsibilities which oblige it to take a leading part thereon. We hold that our interests in this hemisphere are greater than those of any European power possibly can be, and that our duty to ourselves and to the weaker republics who are our neighbors requires us to see that none of the great military powers from across the seas shall encroach upon the territory of the American republics or acquire control thereover.

This policy, therefore, not only forbids us to acquiesce in such territorial acquisition, but also causes us to object to the acquirement of a control which would in its effect be equal to territorial aggrandizement. This is why the United States has steadily believed that the construction of the great Isthmian Canal, the building of which is to stand as the greatest material feat of the twentieth century—greater than any similar feat in any preceding century—should be done by no foreign nation but by ourselves. The canal must of necessity go through the territory of one of our smaller sister republics. We have been scrupulously careful to abstain from perpetrating any wrong upon any of these republics in this matter. We do not wish to interfere with their rights in the least, but, while carefully safeguarding them, to build the canal ourselves under provisions which will enable us, if necessary, to police and protect it, and to guarantee its neutrality, we being the sole guarantor. Our intention was steadfast; we desired action taken so that the canal could always be used by us in time of peace and war alike, and in time of war could never be used to our detriment by any nation which was hostile to us. Such action, by the circumstances surrounding it, was necessarily for the benefit and not the detriment of the adjacent American republics.