The range stockmen of to-day are in much the same position as the reservation Indian. The tides of civilization, advancing from east and west, have met and threaten to overwhelm them. Like the Indian they must meet the new conditions with new methods. They must not, and need not, be overwhelmed, but can be assimilated in the new order of things. The day of free grass in the State of Texas came to an end twenty years ago. The old-timers shook their heads and prophesied all sorts of dire happenings to the State. To-day Texas has more cattle and sheep, and better ones, too, than ever before, and they are still growing in numbers. A convention of stockmen was held at Denver in 1898, at which the burning question was the then new plan of forest reserves. The sheep men from Wyoming, Utah, and one or two other Western States, declared with a bitterness born of conviction that if the government made any forest reserves in their States it would mean the total annihilation of the sheep industry there. To-day these States are plastered with national forests, and each has three or four times as many sheep as it had ten years ago. There has arisen, of course, from the men who have used these government lands without money and without price, a continuous cry that the grazing fees the Forest Service collects are "illegal, unjust and double taxation," The complaint, of course, will not bear analysis. The land belongs, not to the stockmen, but to the whole people. Why should the government give something to a stockman in Wyoming, that belongs equally to a stockman in Ohio, who is raising live stock on private land, in keen competition with Western free grass men? The fees are scarcely illegal. If the government can sell one man one hundred acres of public land, it certainly can sell another man the grass and forage crop produced upon any portion of the public lands. One is no more a case of merchandizing than the other. As for the double taxation argument, that too is equally childish, because the grazing fee is not a tax but the price of a commodity. As a matter of fact, the government spends annually, in trail and road building through the forests, that the stock may more easily and safely reach the higher grazing areas, in fighting the fires, in building telephone lines to the very remotest corners of the forests, in hiring hunters to exterminate the wolves and other wild animals that prey upon the stockman's herds, in digging deep wells and erecting windmills and other pumping engines to furnish water where there is none on the surface, a sum almost equal to the entire amount paid in fees by the stockmen, and all for their sole benefit and use.