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Show EARLY EFFORTS TO PROTECT PUBLIC TIMBERLANDS 549 timber. A sufficient number of agents should be appointed to give adequate protection to the government's timber-lands. They should be authorized to sell timber to meet local needs, whether for mining, building, or other purposes. He urged making it a penal offence to willfully, negligently, or carelessly set fire to growing timber on government land.52 The way of the reformer is not easy, as both Schurz and Williamson quickly discovered. Their revival of the use of timber agents and the vigorous warfare they conducted against trespassers met with little sympathy in Congress. Anything that would slow economic exploitation of the natural resources, no matter how wasteful that exploitation was, aroused opposition. The miners of Colorado and Nevada saw the timbers they needed for shoring up the ceiling of their mines costing them more, the railroads and their tie contrac-t6rs saw themselves shut out from the public domain, the sawmill operator who had bought a winter's cutting from a small logger operating on the public lands feared he would not obtain logs he had counted on to keep his mill going. All were distressed and found it easy to accuse the representatives of the Department of the Interior of resorting to arbitrary action against the small, defenseless man, of taking steps that threatened the very basis of existence of thousands of people in the South, the Lake States, the mining communities, and the rapidly growing lumber industry on the West Coast. These interests met with congressional sympathy when they sought to halt through legislation much of the protective work that was being done. Aaron Sargent of California led the attack in the Senate and was supported vindictively by James G. Blaine who hated Carl Schurz so venomously that he went against the general 52 Secretary of the Interior, Annual Report, 1S77, pp. xix-xx. attitude of the Northeast which favored enforcing the timber regulations. Along with Sargent and Henry Teller of Colorado, Blaine argued strenuously for a measure that would prevent the enforcement of those regulations against actual settlers, no matter how large their operations were.53 The debate waxed hot with Sargent and Teller accusing the New England, especially the Massachusetts, Senators of misunderstanding any and all legislation affecting western interests and taking an extraordinarily provincial position. Senators Hoar and Dawes of Massachusetts showed little inclination to defend Schurz but they did point out that all he had done was to enforce the law. Sargent declared "obsolete" the statute of March 2, 1831, on which enforcement was based; it provided for punishment of offences committed in cutting, destroying, or removing live oak or other timber or trees reserved for naval purposes. Blaine denied that there was any authority for the enforcement procedures. Hoar argued that the statute was not obsolete. As expounded by the Supreme Court in 1850 in United States v. Briggs it had been put into force in 1850-55, efforts to repeal it, made within the last 8 years, had failed, and it had been re-enacted in the Revised Statutes in 1873. The arrogance of Blaine, Sargent, and Teller and the fact that among those who defended Schurz and Williamson, only Stanley Matthews of Ohio was sufficiently familiar with the question to discuss it effectively, enabled the Senators from the public land states with timber to win. In the House the discussion was on a fairer basis. There a number of Representatives were familiar with the intricacies of the question and they managed to make it clear that it was not the small settler who was being persecuted by the agents, as alleged, but rather great corpo- ^Cong. Record, 45th Cong., 2d sess., March 12, 19, 1876, pp. 1684, 1722, 1860-74. |