ADDRESS

GEORGE F. AUTHEIR, Journalist

I would be less than frank if I did not feel complemented in having been invited to be present on the occasion of the meeting of the American Forestry Association and the Southern Forestry Congress.

In admitting this gratification, I am sure the exponents of forestry will permit me to go further and express to our Richmond hosts the genuine thrill I experience in being, for the first time in my life, within the historic precincts of the capitol city of the Old Dominion.

Ever since the development of memory has made it possible for me to look both forward and backward, the charm of this city, its historic appeal, its splendid setting, has had a peculiar facination for me which I am gratifying for the first time tonight. Although I have lived within the vicinity of Richmond for several years and have planned to visit it often, something hitherto has always happened to thwart my hopes of arriving.

It is possible that the desire to visit Richmond which has always been strong upon me is an inherited instinct, for one of the earliest recollections of my boyhood concerns the assembling of several uncles about my father's hearthstone, where I heard them confess to a similar longing entertained by them about the period ranging from '61 to 65. As in my own case, always, just as they were about to crash the gates, something has invariably happened to enduce them to change their minds. And even if they did not carry away with them souvenirs of the proverbial Southern hospitality, some of them carried other souvenirs which registered the unerring accuracy of the markmanship of the Virginians of those days.

It is fitting that Richmond should be the setting for the meeting of the American Forestry Association and the Southern Forestry Congress. No state within the Union has been so prilific in its contribution of service to the nation as Virginia and in that credit its capital city shares. Nor are there any organizations so founded upon the ideal of service as the forestry and the conservation groups of this country.

Our entire history, epic as it is, has been a struggle with no less a difficulty than the conquest of a continent. What we enjoy today is but the fruition of infinite struggles and sacrifices, running all the way from Jamestown to Belleau Wood. We of the present are but the exe

cutors of the past and upon us rests the responsibility of expressing our appreciation of what we enjoy by passing our inheritance, unimpaired, to the generations to come.

It is this ideal of service which has characterized and motivated the forestry and conservation movements. The ever insistent temptation is to exploit the present, and let the future take care of itself. Forestry would develop the present so the future may not be poorer. Both of them are twins born out of the ideal of service-a service suggested by gratitude for the past and obligations to the future. With them walk the correlated duty of construction and development.

As to the contest impending in Congress between the stockmen of the west and the Forestry Service of the United States Government, I am running in neutral. I am much in the state of mind of the man who was careless about his eternal salvation because, as he expressed it, he had friends in both places. As a newspaperman, sitting on the sidelines of the investigations which were being conducted last summer, I was able to recognize the good points in both sides of the controversy. But as to the spirit and attitude of the doctrines of forestry and conservation there can be but one judgement and that is one of hearty approval and encouragement. If errors have been committed in the administration of this great department, there is a willingness and a desire to rectify. If there are compromises that should be made, I am certain they will be brought about. If there are revolutionary changes justified, I am confident they will be recognized and attempted.

But I am equally confident that whatever is done will always recognize the importance, the value and the abiding worth of the principles of conservation set in motion during the lifetime of Theodore Roosevelt and that no group of men will ever be permitted to impoverish tomorrow by exploiting today.

It is not my purpose to discuss the values of this controversy. I could not do it from a partisan view and from the viewpoint of the forest service no man is better qualified to explain its position than Col. W. B. Greeley, Chief Forester of the United States. I accompanied the Senatorial Investigating Committee of last summer on its western pilgrimage. Col. Greeley was present at all these meetings, including an almost nightly banquet in which the Forest Service was assailed and its representatives referred to as "bureaucrats." Throughout this experience, Col. Greeley conducted himself under trying circumstances with a poise and self respect that challenged the admiration of all. He never lost

his temper, he never allowed himself to be baited, he was never jarred into a hasty or ill-considered word. Always he was master of himself and listened and participated with an air of a man sincerely interested in doing what he could for the western cattlemen and sheep business, so far as possible without sacrificing the basic principles of the Forest Service and the philosophy of conservation.

Discussion of forestry and conservation, however, from one who is inexpert, must necessarily be academic, and reflection moves me to justify the thrill which has come to me tonight in being here and which I referred to in the beginning.

Forests are but trees grouped, and beneath them must be a fertile soil and favorable conditions. Thoughts of trees naturally suggest thoughts of men and the soil of Virginia has been exceptionally fruitful in producing both. And these men of Virginia especially recall the giants of the forest, with their heads towering into the skies, their bodies rugged and strong, and their roots deeply inbedded in the soil. And as no state has born a more meaningful part in the building of our nation, so no state has contributed more generously in its quota of men whose names have found their way into the world's recital of great deeds accomplished.

It would be presumptuous of me, a son of the North, to attempt to tell you Virginians why you should be proud of your state. But it is not unfitting that I should confess some of my own reasons for revering the Old Dominion.

Here is the very cradle of the nation. The settlement at Jamestown antedates those of any other section and it was here that sturdy John Smith enunciated the doctrine of a working world, that he who will not work may not eat.

Virginia's contribution to the building of the new world has not been recognized at its true value chiefly because its men were men of action. In New England, where the climate and other causes developed a more dour mentality, men were prone to look upon duty performed with satisfaction and to write books about it. In Virginia the tendency was to perform the day's work as a matter of fact and to accomplish it with the gay and careless philosophy of noblesse oblige.

But Jamestown cannot be erased from the map any more than can the fact that you have a roadstead there in which all the navies of the world may lie at rest. The time is not far distant, when an awakened intelligence on the part of the American public will see the unwisdom of attempting to route the nation's traffic through the narrow neck of the bot

tle at New York and will seek to divert it by way of the central route. That will mean that a traffic greater than that which now pours into New York, eventually will traverse Virginia and the settlement grouped along Hampton Roads will become one of the greatest entrepots of the world.

But the achievements of the future, for Virginia, will ever be hallowed and illumed by the light of a sacred past. With such a past, material accomplishment must always be colored with the traditions which shed their radiance upon your history.

The beginnings at Jamestown but presaged the days to come. When the rumblings of discontent were heard; when the American colonies were girding themselves to assert the rights of man, it was a Virginian who reduced the spirit of the times to a phrase and made the purpose of America vocal.

For centuries past, privilege and caste had levied tribute upon mankind. The protesting voices of the countless Grachii of the centuries were concentrated in the inspired utterance of Patrick Henry when he expressed the modern alternative of "give me liberty or give me death," and flung his proud defiance into the faces of the oppressors of mankind for all time.

This was Virginia's initial contribution to that stirring period. When the country went to war, the nation turned instinctively to Virginia for a commander-in-chief for its armies and found George Washington ready. It would seem that a state which had furnished Washington had completed its quota. But even God exacts a surtax and the eternal law demands that those who have, shall continue to give in even greater and still greater abundance. Virginia supplemented Washington by giving the nation Jefferson, whose inspired eloquence dictated the Declaration of Independence, the greatest document which human liberty has ever produced. But two presidents were not enough and they were followed by Madison and Monroe. Such brilliant gifts to a nation's progress had never before been equalled and have not yet been approached.

The list was still unfinished and John Marshall takes his place as the first great Chief Justice of the nation, vitalizing the Constitution—making it through his wise interpretations the memorable document and fundamental law of the greatest nation in the world's history that it is today.

But even this does not exhaust the roll. While Virginia had furnished the commander-in-chief of the army, it was from the banks of the Rappa

hannock that John Paul Jones came to carve one of the world's most brilliant naval careers and to found the splendid traditions of the American navy. These names by no means completes the list which my time is to short to conclude.

The time came when the union of the states appeared to be severed and an inscrutable providence decreed that the annealing process must be completed in the supreme sacrifice. Virginia differed in that argument from the states of the North, but she bore herself with a courage and vigor and probity and deep devotion to the right, as she saw it, that has won the unstinted admiration not only of the nation as a whole, but of the world as well. Men may continue to differ as to the justification for that conflict, but Providence chooses her own methods and works in mysterious ways her wonders to perform.

Virginia honors the memory of her great captain. It is an admiration which the North shares. So splendidly has Providence justified her methods, that today the North vies with the South in its regard for the man who led the armies of the Southern states and divides its affection for Abraham Lincoln with its admiration for Robert E. Lee.

As the years go by, more and more, the world learns to recognize the genius, the capacity, and the nobility of character of General Lee. Only a short time ago, from the Press Gallery of the House of Representatives, I saw the venerable figure of Major Charles M. Stedman of North Carolina arise in his place on the floor to pay tribute to the memory of General Lee. At its conclusion, General Isaac Sherwood of Ohio arose on the Republican side, crossed the aisle, and clasping the hand of Major Stedman congratulated him and endorsed the tribute he had uttered. The House came up standing and cheered the tableau so presented. Since then General Sherwood has answered the last roll call. As he had done many a time before upon the field of battle, he sleeps tonight beneath the stars, a white and silent shaft of marble doing sentinel duty above his grave. Major Stedman remains the last surviving spokesman of that Titanic period to serve in the House of Representatives, the last figure from a time that was prolific in the production of heroes.

When the World War came, still another Virginian was on guard in the White House. Civilization was bled almost white and was in despair when this later son of Virginia, in words of eloquence which burned themselves unto the pages of history, expressed the aspirations of a world grown weary of its travail. He summoned the nation to arms and from