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Soldiers of the Common Good: August: Congress

Building up a community or a forest or a nation or letting it run down is a sort of chain process; lumber companies don't replant because of tax laws and fire hazards; members of Congress and of State legislatures don't make needed appropriations for forest service or enact proper tax laws because of indiscriminate complaints about taxes or because their constituents are wrapped up in their local affairs. The actions of Congress and of all lawmaking bodies depend on public sentiment, and we're public sentiment--you and I and our parents and our neighbors; and if we're more interested in getting a new post-office building or something else for our town than we are in appropriations to protect our forests, our representatives in Congress will, naturally, vote money for the local things and leave the more important thing undone. "Duty," said some witty chap, "is our feeling of what somebody else ought to do."

There is a great truth hidden in that light remark; but, as I have already said, if I knew such things as we have been talking about, what the country is losing every year through "bad housekeeping" in the privately owned timber-lands and in the industries immediately connected with the forest and, worst of all, the incredible annual destruction caused by carelessness with fire, and how well the Forest Service people and others are doing their duty, I'd be ashamed not to do mine, wouldn't you?

We young people will be voters ourselves before we know it, and one of the things we'll have the opportunity to do will be to support and advance, by word and vote, the forest policies of our State and nation. But there's a still bigger thing we can do, long before we are old enough to vote. Perhaps you've heard of the small boy who said pins had saved thousands of people's lives, and when asked how, replied: "By their not swallowing them!"

So we young people, and there are 22,000,000 of us in the public schools right now, can save thousands of acres of forest-trees by not setting them afire; and by seeing to it that our parents and other close friends and relatives are equally thoughtful. I'm sure you're not going to let all we have been learning, in the 30,000 words or so of this book, go in one ear and out the other, and I hope one of the best qualifications for co-operation in useful private enterprises, as well as for the high privilege of partnership in conducting the affairs of this great country of ours, will be the good business sense and sense of citizenship we have found to be so essential a part of our study of forestry in our year together in The Wonderland of Trees.