Whatever it may be possible for the Government to accomplish, its work must ultimately fail unless your interest and support give it permanence and power. It is only as the producing and commercial interests of the country come to realize that they need to have trees growing up in the forest not less than they need the product of the trees cut down that we may hope to see the permanent prosperity of both safely secured. This statement is true not only as to forests in private ownership, but as to the national forests as well. Unless the men from the West believe in forest preservation the Western forests can not be preserved. We here at the headquarters of the National Government recognize that absolutely. We believe, we know, that it is essential for the well-being of the people of the States of the great plains, the States of the Rockies, the States of the Pacific Slope, that the forests shall be preserved, and we know also that our belief will count for nothing unless the people of those States themselves wish to preserve the forests. If they do we can help materially; we can direct their efforts, but we can not save the forests unless they wish them to be saved. I ask, with all the intensity that I am capable, that the men of the West will remember the sharp distinction I have just drawn between the man who skins the land and the man who develops the country. I am going to work with, and only with, the man who develops the country. I am against the land skinner every time. Our policy is consistent to give to every portion of the public domain its highest possible amount of use, and of course that can be given only through the hearty co-operation of the Western people. I would like to add one word as to the creation of a national forest service which I have recommended repeatedly in messages to Congress, and especially in my last. I wish to see all the forest work of the Government concentrated in the Department of Agriculture. It is folly to scatter such work, as I have said over and over again, and the policy which this Administration is trying to carry out through the creation of such a service is that of making the national forests more actively and more permanently useful to the people of the West, and I am heartily glad to know that the Western sentiment supports more and more vigorously the policy of setting aside national forests, the creation of a national forest service, and especially the policy of increasing the permanent usefulness of these forest lands to all who come in contact with them. With what is rapidly getting to be a practically unbroken sentiment in the West behind such a forest policy, with what is rapidly getting to be a practically unbroken support by the great stable interests behind the general policy of the conservative use of the forests, we have a right to feel that we have entered on an era of great and lasting progress. Only entered upon it; much, very much, remains to be