Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/49

Rh haste to strip the public domain of what he can lay his hands on, lest another timber thief get ahead of him—and, in doing this, destroying sometimes far more than he steals. It is the tourist, the hunter, the mining prospector who, lighting his camp-fire in the woods to boil water for his coffee or to fry his bacon, and leaving that fire unextinguished when he proceeds, sets the woods in flames and delivers countless square miles of forest to destruction.

It is all these, but it is something more, and, let us confess it, something worse. It is a public opinion looking with indifference on this wanton, barbarous, disgraceful vandalism. It is a spendthrift people recklessly wasting its heritage. It is a Government careless of the future and unmindful of a pressing duty.

I have had some personal experience of this. The gentleman who introduced me did me the honor of mentioning the attention I devoted to this subject years ago as Secretary of the Interior. When I entered upon that important office, having the public lands in charge, I considered it my first duty to look around me and to study the problems I had to deal with. Doing so I observed all the wanton waste and devastation I have described. I observed the notion that the public forests were everybody's property, to be taken and used or wasted as anybody pleased, everywhere in full operation. I observed enterprising timber thieves not merely stealing trees, but stealing whole forests. I observed hundreds of sawmills in full blast, devoted exclusively to the sawing up of timber stolen from the public lands.

I observed a most lively export trade going on from Gulf ports as well as Pacific ports, with fleets of vessels employed in carrying timber stolen from the public lands to be sold in foreign countries, immense tracts being devastated that some robbers might fill their pockets.

I thought that this sort of stealing was wrong, in this