The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1897-03-19
FLOODS AND CUSTOMS.

FLOODS AND CUSTOMS.
A high-tariff contemporary which is
jingling all its bells in honor of the
probable passage of the Dingley bill
publishes, at the same time, an ardent
and convincing editorial article on the
need of care for forestry interests as
preventive of disastrous freshets. 1t is
understood on all sides now that forest
protection is the most effectual means
of distributing precipitation evenly
over the year. Wherever rainfall and
snowfall are concentrated into a short
period and there are months of
burning drought, successful agricul-
ture becomes impossible. AS compan-
ion piece to the torrid days of summer,
when growing crops are ruined before
they can reach maturity, we have ire
mendous cloudbursts and sudden floods
that sweep resistlessly everything in
their course. Along the lower Missis-
sippi, particularly at the present time,
and in other parts of the country as
WELL the people are experiencing the
misfortunes that follows the freshet.
Nobody pretends to deny that q part
of these calamities is due to the rapid
denudation of forest areas, and that
if we proceed to destroy our woods as
rapidly and recklessly in the future as
in the past, we will be obliged either
to resort to costly methods Of reforest-
ing, or else experience the fate of those
countries that have become practically
uninhabitable because their trees are
all cut away. So the man who argues
for forest preservation and shows the
calamities that may fall upon millions
of people and f1ourishing communities
by the continual slaughter of our for
ests is arguing from facts and appeal
ing to worthy motives.
Is it not now the most singular incon-
sistency that ever took possession of
mortal mind to find this same man en-
Enthusiastically urging the passage of the
Dingley bill, which places upon lumber
a tariff double that Of the Mckinley
law, one plainly intended not even for
protective purposes, but to prohibit all
Importation? OF all the items in our
voluminous tariff, duty on lumber has al
! ways been the least eXcusable and most
criminal. So ample has been our forest
supply that the proposition that any
outsider could convey to us a product
as bulky as lumber and compete in our
markets with the near-at-hand supply
is absurd in the face of it. It has been
proved absurd by practice. The honest
lumbermen of this country confess that
they can hold their own with anybody
without fear of competition. 1t is the
lUmbermen who are also owners of
pine land, who have bought their stump
age and who want to exclude the for
eign product and make prices to suit
themselves, who have demanded a tar
if. 1t is they who have fixed the pirat-
ical rate ir the Dingley bill. In all
that act there is no other paragraph
so replete with the essence of brigand-
age.
Now, not only is this duty unwar-
ranted in itself, a clear concession to
monopoly, but it also operates against
our own industrial interest and prog
| resS. By just so much as we exclude
! the foreign lumber product, by Just so
much do we increase the draft upon
our resources. The demand of the pub
lie for lumber will be only slightly
lessened by this prohibitive tariff, be-
cause 1t is a common necessary of life.
! If it cannot be obtained from without
the country, it must be had from with
in; and thus the tariff makes sure that
| the destruction of our forests, with all
its unfortunate incidental consequences.
must proceed with accelerated veloci-
! ty. The lumber tariff is a bid for all
those disastrous weather conditions.
those alterations of excessive heat
and cold, the tempestuous change from
drought to food, that are the appre-
hension of the sober thinker. Yet the
man who understands all this will also
ask congress to pass an act which will
help, more than all other influences
combined, to bring about this unhappy
condition, for no other reason than to
add to the unearned profits of a few
millionaire lumber kings. This is what
happens to public interests when they
come into collision with system bas-
ed upon monopoly and favoritism.