Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/178

 174, like the Adams house, worth a couple of hundred thousand, reverts, and is a very welcome addition to their unrestricted funds.

Would it not have been, and even now be, a wise policy for the states and their land-owning institutions to have leased much of their lands for a term of years rather than deeded the property outright? Certainly a lot of land would have come back to them, and kept off that mælstrom of useless expense—the delinquent tax list. While this I would merely suggest, what I would urge is more careful and intelligent consideration of our waning natural resources, so that before they are gone we may develop substitute products and replacing industries, and that their proceeds may go in part into permanent improvements, stone roads replacing plank roads, stone or cement bridges wooden bridges, stone or cement dams wooden dams, and into other additions to the permanent wealth of the state.

It is hard to find any wealth that has been better spent for the permanent wealth of the community than that which has been spent on educational institutions. They produce intelligent citizens. They draw into the state an intelligent public which spend much money at the time. Many of them stay to help build up the state. Their buildings and equipment will be more and more Meccas and permanent objects of interest and attraction and resort. Their scientific researches will help to develop, to save and to replace our natural resources.

I can picture in my mind two fortunes, and they will be but composite photographs drawn from life. The one is built upon a reckless cutting out of the choicest of the lumber, none but the best taken, the brush left around and fired, either purposely or fraudulently, to conceal theft. In the path of the first fires is left either a tangled mass of worthless trash, overgrown with bushes and fireweed, ready fuel for the series of conflagrations that sweep through from time to time, or a sandy plain covered with sweet fern and goldenrod, used by speculators to defraud the settlers, who from time to time try to make a livelihood from it. There are here three wastes, the half-gathered crop of timber later burned, the land left in a useless condition, and labor wasted in trying to make it useful. The logs thus gathered are driven to the mill by a crew of loose livers whose hard-earned wages are largely scattered to the dive and brothel in a few weeks. The saw mills devour them and circular saws rip a wide swath of sawdust waste at each cut; piles of slabs, sawdust and waste of every description are transported in a continuous stream to an ever-burning fire whose pillar of cloud by day and fire by night betokens not the presence of Jehovah, but the demon of destruction. The timber itself is shipped away, and the money thus acquired by one who keeps on making money because he does not know what else to do is squandered by his heirs, who by