the Government for what had been spent to reclaim the land. The
baser part of human nature always seeks a scapegoat; and it might
naturally be expected that the repudiators and their supporters
should concentrate their attacks upon the head of the Reclamation
Service, to whose outstanding ability and continuous labor they
owed that for which they were now unwilling to pay. But no
attack, not even the adverse report of an ill-humored
congressional committee, can alter the fact of the tremendous
service that Newell and his loyal associates in the Reclamation
Service did for the nation and the people of the United States.
By 1915 reclamation had added to the arable land of the country a
million and a quarter acres, of which nearly eight hundred
thousand acres were already "under water," and largely under
tillage, producing yearly more than eighteen million dollars'
worth of crops.

When Roosevelt became President there was a Bureau of Forestry in
the Department of Agriculture, but it was a body entrusted with
merely the study of forestry problems and principles. It
contained all the trained foresters in the employ of the
Government; but it had no public forest lands whatever to which
the knowledge and skill of these men could be applied. All the
forest reserves of that day were in the charge of the Public Land
Office in the Department of the Interior. This was managed by
clerks who knew nothing of forestry, and most, if not all, of
whom had never seen a stick of the timber or an acre of the
woodlands for which they were responsible. The mapping and
description of the timber lay with the Geological Survey. So the
national forests had no foresters and the Government foresters no
forests.