In 1889, it was estimated that Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming contained fifty-three thousand square miles of forest--Colorado and New Mexico, thirty thousand; and that other portions of the public domain were covered with large and valuable belts, and of which the Hon. Secretary of Agriculture says in his reports: “We are wasting our forests, by axe, by fire, by pasturage, by _neglect_. They are rapidly falling below the amount required by industrial needs, by our water supply, by our rivers, by our climate, by our navigation and agriculture. It is high time to _call a halt_. The devastation of the axe will probably go on in the forests owned by private parties. Other forms of devastation _can and should be stopped by vigorous measures on the part of the Government_.” “_Our only hope_,” says Secretary Rusk, “_is to save what forests we have still in public possession, ... not allowing them to be cut except under such conditions as will insure ample reproduction_.” Six years have passed since the above important declarations were made, still nothing has been done to deter the thieves or ward off a pending calamity. For future forest supplies the people of the United States must look to the general government which controls the national domain, holds the keys of the public treasury, and is responsible for this source of national wealth. From various authentic sources, it is stated of the once-timbered countries in Southern Europe, Northern Africa and from the Russian Empire to South India, which are now uninhabited barren wastes, has been due to changes of climate, soil and water-fall, from the loss of forests. The once fertile valleys of Syria, with springs and brooks, and fields of grain and grass, are as parched and dry, and water as scarce as it is on the desert or staked plains--summer suns have scorched the unprotected soil--hot winds absorbed the last vestige of moisture--the air is filled with clouds of loose dust, and the naked mountains stand as monuments of departed glory, of the Roman provinces from the Caucasus to the archipelago. Look at the wasted peninsulas of Southern Europe. What has reduced to skeletons the inhabitants of the garden lands of the nations of classic antiquity? Greece has become a barren rock, and Sicily, “the pearl of the Mediterranean,” a hospital of famine, typhus and purulent ophthalmia! Has not the desolation in each been due to one and the same cause?--the destruction of forests. Why then should history repeat itself on this subject in America? As early as 1832, the wisdom of Mehemet Ali saw the cause of the poverty and distress, and applied the only remedy that ever has or ever will restore life-sustaining conditions, and commenced re-establishing forests on the sand plains of upper Egypt--Abyssinia and the slopes of the mountains--at the rate of one hundred thousand acres annually.