It is a pleasure to greet all of you here this afternoon, but of course especially the members of the American Forest Congress. You have made, by your coming, a meeting which is without parallel in the history of forestry. And, Mr. Secretary, I must take this opportunity of saying to you what you so amply deserve, that no man in this country has done so much as you have done in the last eight years to make it possible to take a business view from the standpoint of all the country of just such questions as this. It is not many years since such a meeting as this would have been regarded as chimerical; the thought of it would have been regarded as absolutely chimerical. In the old pioneer days the American had but one thought about a tree, and that was to cut it down; and the mental attitude of the Nation toward the forests was largely conditioned upon the fact that the life work of the earlier generations of our people had been of necessity to hew down the forests, for they had to make clearings on which to live; and it was not until half a century of our national life had passed that any considerable body of American citizens began to live under conditions where the tree ceased to be something to be cleared off the earth. It always takes time to get the mind of a people accustomed to any change in conditions, and it took a long time to get the mind of our people, as a whole, accustomed to the fact that they had to alter their attitude toward the forests. For the first time the great business and the forest interests of the Nation have joined together, through delegates altogether worthy of the organizations they represent, to consider their individual and their common interests in the forest. This congress may well be called a meeting of forest users, for that the users of the forest come together to consider how best to combine use with preservation is the significant fact of the meeting, the fact full of powerful promise for the forests of the future.