Harper's Weekly Editorials on Carl Schurz/A Faithful Public Officer

bitter personal attack of Senator upon Secretary for his efforts to protect government property has certainly not injured the Secretary. The attempt to excite prejudice against him as a foreign-born citizen, and to represent the timber thieves as pioneers carrying the flag, was ingenious, but unsuccessful. Secretary promptly published a statement of the facts. He said:

&ldquo;Some Senators attack the Interior Department for doing a thing it has not done. We were arraigned for having persecuted settlers and miners who wanted a little wood and timber for their stores and mines, while we really had only prosecuted speculators who had depredated upon the public lands on a large scale for the sake of personal profit. Under the instructions of this department not a settler or miner has been touched except where persons have cut timber under the cover of fraudulent pre-emption or homestead claims. When these speculators have obtained from five to eight dollars per cord for wood, and from twenty to sixty dollars per thousand feet for manufactured lumber which they have taken from public lands, they can afford to pay the government at least a small part of their profit, as people in other parts of the country have to do.

&ldquo;As to depopulating the Territories, there are no signs of that, either in Montana or any other Territory, in consequence of the action of the Interior Department; but it is a notorious fact that the consumption of timber which persons take for nothing from the public lands will be infinitely more wasteful than if they have to pay for it. In this way the mountain-sides in these Territories will very soon be stripped of their forests; and the forests once destroyed, the mountain-sides will remain bare forever. If that goes on in the present wasteful manner only a short period longer, then these Territories will become in part uninhabitable and depopulated, especially the valleys, which depend upon a regular supply of water. If the consumption of timber can be reduced to the actual necessities of the people by the action of the government, and the waste now going on be prevented, the Territories, instead of being depopulated, will be protected against moist disastrous consequences, which otherwise must necessarily ensue.

&ldquo;I notice that our method of doing this has been called un-American. I never thought it was un-American to prevent stealing, to enforce laws. We are bound to execute laws as they are, as well as we can. If these laws are not as they should be, it is the business of Congress to make them so. The operations of the department for the prevention of timber devastation apply only in a very limited extent to the Territories. The principal field of operations is in the timber-growing States, such as Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and others. .... Those who were called spies in the employ of the Interior Department were simply agents who were sent out to discover what depredations had been committed and who committed them, and if the department wanted to know any thing about the matter, these agents had to be called upon for information, as depredators are not in the habit of reporting themselves.&rdquo;

Simultaneously with this statement came a report from a special agent of the General Land Office at Pensacola, in Florida, saying that

&ldquo;within a radius of seventy-five miles of that place the public lands have been denuded of more timber than in the same radius in any other locality in the United States. The harbor there admits vessels of the greatest tonnage. Innumerable creeks, rivers, bayous, bays, and sounds make a greater quantity of timber accessible than at any other place on the Gulf of Mexico. The Custom-house records at Pensacola show that during the last fiscal year, ending June 30, 1877, 857 vessels, with 6826 sailors and a tonnage of 276,724 tons, cleared from that place, laden with 9,375,432 cubic feet of ships' spars and hewed timber, and 67,787,222 feet of sawed timber and lumber. The hewn goods are carried directly from the stumps to ships; 2800 stevedores, 3000 cutters and raftsmen, and 6826 seamen are annually employed in cutting, removing, and carrying abroad the pine forests of that locality. Trustworthy persons there estimate that about seven-tenths of the lumber shipped from there is taken from the public domain, and that $200,000 could be recovered there for the government if the cases are properly prosecuted.&rdquo;

If hostility to the Secretary can find nothing in his course to ridicule and censure but his active efforts to save the national property from an organized system of robbery, it is not a hostility that need make him uneasy.


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