feed products to the value of $150,000,000 a year are destroyed by
prairie dogs, ground squirrels, and other rodents. It is said that
prairie dogs often take half the pasturage of western cattle
ranges. It is estimated that the killing of wolves, coyotes,
mountain lions, bobcats, and lynxes saved more than $2,000,000
worth of livestock in 1918. Floods have destroyed $100,000,000 in
property in the Mississippi Valley alone.

The loss from fire in the United States is said to equal the value
of our total product of gold, silver, copper, and petroleum.

The buildings consumed by fire in 1914, if placed on lots of 65
feet frontage, would line both sides of a street extending from
New York to Chicago. A person journeying along this street of
desolation would pass in every thousand feet a ruin from which an
injured person was taken. At every three fourths of a mile in this
journey he would encounter the charred remains of a human being
who has been burned to death. [Footnote: "The Fire Tax and Waste
of Structural Materials in the United States," Bulletin 814, U. S.
Geological Survey, Department of the Interior.]

THE SERVICE OF GOVERMENT

Protection against loss of property is one of the chief services
performed for us by our government. We have already noted in
Chapter XII what a great deal of work both the national and state
governments are doing to prevent loss of crops and of livestock
from disease, insects, and other causes. What this may mean to the
individual farmer and to the country is suggested by the case of a
farmer who had hundreds of acres of corn destroyed in some manner