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Show 476. white men. All of this was in the past. But he wondered how it was possible, at such a late date, that the United States Government was acting "like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a magnificient estate in perfect order." As he quickly noted, Prussia, France, Switzerland, even Japan and India were far ahead of America in the management and care of forests. What was wrong in America, that it had never grown up and acquired a mature perspective toward Nature? Perhaps, he thought, the issue was one of law. The Timber and Stone Act of 1878, "which might well have been called the 'dust and ashes act,'" allowed wealthy corporations to attain fraudulent title to ten or twenty thousand acres or more. The large capitalists were more to blame than the small ones, since "it cost about as much to steal timber for one mill as for ten, and therefore the ordinary lumberman can no longer compete with the large corporations." Muir did not complain about the vast holdings the railroads had acquired, although he found them guilty of inadvertently setting fire to hundreds of square miles of forest each year. He thought they might honestly advertise, "Come! travel our way- Ours is the blackest. It is the only genuine Erebus route." But the real cause of all the desolation in the West was a moral one. " . . . timber thieves of the Western class are seldom convicted, for the good reason that most of the jurors who try such cases are themselves as guilty as those on trial." In the "practical West," pioneers still believed that forests were boundless and inexhaustible. They would never fight a |