a thousand square miles of their fine forests by German shells.
And yet the photographs that they show of this wreck and utter
demolition may be reproduced indefinitely on 10,000,000 acres of
our forest lands swept each year by equally devastating fire for
which our own people are responsible. You have doubtless already
forgotten that forest fire which last autumn, in Minnesota, burned
over an area half as large again as Massachusetts, destroying more
than twenty-five towns, killing 400 people, and leaving 13,000
homeless. [Footnote: "Developing the Estate," ATLANTIC MONTHLY,
March, 1919, pp. 384-385.]

The nation has been defrauded of a great deal of wealth in timber
by speculators who have taken advantage of the homestead laws.

Single tracts of 160 acres often have a value for the timber alone
of $20,000 ... Lands acquired ... under the guise of the homestead
law are to-day in the hands of lumber companies who promptly
purchased them from the settlers as soon as the title passed, and
are either reserving them for later cutting or are holding the
land itself after cutting for from $40 to $60 an acre, or even
more--a speculative process which effectively prevents the
possibility of men of small means acquiring and establishing homes
there. [Footnote 2: "The National Forests and the Farmer," in YEAR
BOOK, Department of Agriculture, 1914, p. 70.]

To prevent this sort of thing, the government now sells the timber
and the land separately, withholding from agricultural entry
heavily timbered land until the timber is cut off.

In the Kaniksy National Forest, in Idaho and Washington, timber