Forestry differs from most professions in this, that it requires as much vigor of body as it does vigor of mind. The sort of man to which it appeals, and which it seeks, is the man with high powers of observation, who does not shrink from responsibility, and whose mental vigor is balanced by physical strength and hardiness. The man who takes up forestry should be little interested in his own personal comfort, and should have and conserve endurance enough to stand severe physical work accompanied by mental labor equally exhausting.
Foresters are still few in numbers, and the point of view which they represent, while it is making immense strides in public acceptance, is still far from general application. Therefore, Foresters are still missionaries in a very real sense, and since they are so few, it is of the utmost importance that they should stand closely together. Differences of opinion there must always be in all professions, but there is no other profession in which it is more important to keep these differences from working out into animosities or separations of any kind. We are fortunate above all in this, that American Foresters are united as probably the members of no other profession. This esprit de corps has given them their greatest power of achievement, and any man who proposes to enter the profession should do so with this fact clearly in mind.
The high standard which the profession of forestry, new in the United States, has already reached, its great power for usefulness to the Nation, now and hereafter, and the large responsibilities which fall so quickly on the men who are trained to accept it—all these things give to the profession a position and dignity which it should be the first care of every man who enters it to maintain or increase.
To stand well at graduation is or ought to be far less the object of a Forester's training than to stand well ten or twenty years after graduation. It is of the first importance that the training should be thorough and complete.
A friend of mine, John Muir, says that the best advice he can give young men is: "Take time to get rich." His idea of getting rich is to fill his mind and spirit full with observations of the nature he so deeply loves and so well understands; so that in his mind it is not money which makes riches, but life in the open and the seeing eye.
Next to those basic traits of personal character, without which no man is worth his salt, the Forester's most important quality is the power of observation, the power to note and understand, or seek to understand, what he sees in the forest. It is just as essential a part of the Forester's equipment to be able to see what is wrong with a piece of forest, and what is required for its improvement, as it is necessary for a physician to be able to diagnose a disease and to prescribe the remedy.
Silvics, which may be said to be the knowledge of how trees behave in health and disease toward each other, and toward light, heat, moisture, and the soil, is the foundation of forestry and the Forester's first task is to bring himself to a high point of efficiency in observing and interpreting these facts of the forest, and to keep himself there. It should be as hard work to walk through the forest, and see what is there to be seen, as to wrestle with the most difficult problem of mathematics. No man can be a good Forester without that quality of observation and understanding which the French call "the forester's eye." It is not the only quality required for success in forestry, but it is unquestionably the first.
Perhaps the second among the qualities necessary for the Forester is common sense, which most often simply means a sympathetic understanding of the circumstances among which a man finds himself. The American Forester must know the United States and understand its people. Nothing which affects the welfare of his country should be indifferent to him. Forestry is a form of practical statesmanship which touches the national life at so many points that no Forester can safely allow himself to remain ignorant of the needs and purposes of his fellow citizens, or to be out of touch with the current questions of the day. The best citizen makes the best Forester, and no man can make a good Forester unless he is a good citizen also.
The Forester can not succeed unless he understands the problems and point of view of his country, and that is the reason why Foresters from other lands were not brought into the United States in the early stages of the forest movement. At that time practically no American Foresters had yet been trained, and the great need of the situation was for men to do the immediately pressing work. Foresters from Germany, France, Switzerland, and other countries could have been obtained in abundant numbers and at reasonable salaries. They were not invited to come because, however well trained in technical forestry, they could not have understood the habits of thought of our people. Therefore, in too many cases, they would have failed to establish the kind of practical understanding which a Forester must have with the men who use, or work in, his forest, if he is to succeed. It was wiser to wait until Americans could be trained, for the practising Forester must handle men as well as trees.
One of the most difficult things to do in any profession which involves drudgery (and I take it that no profession which does not involve drudgery is worth the attention of a man) is to look beyond the daily routine to the things which that routine is intended to assist in accomplishing. This is peculiarly true of forestry, in which, perhaps more than in any other profession, the long-distance, far-sighted attitude of mind is essential to success. The trees a Forester plants he himself will seldom live to harvest. Much of his thought about his forest must be in terms of centuries. The great object for which he is striving of necessity can not be fully accomplished during his lifetime. He must, therefore, accustom himself to look ahead, and to reap his personal satisfaction from the planned and orderly development of a scheme the perfect fruit of which he can never hope to see.
This is one of the strongest reasons why the Forester, whether in public or private employment, must always look upon himself as a public servant. It is of the first importance that he should accustom himself to think of the results of his work as affecting, not primarily himself, but others, always including the general public. It is essential for a Forester to form the habit of looking far ahead, out of which grows a sound perspective and persistence in body and mind.
One of the greatest football players of our time makes the distinction between a player who is "quick" and a player who is "soon." In his description, the "quick" player is the man who waits until the last moment and then moves with nervous and desperate haste in the little time he has left. The man who is "soon," however, almost invariably arrives ahead of the man who is "quick," because he has thought out in advance exactly where he is going and how to get there, and when the moment comes he does not delay his start, makes no false motions, and thereby makes and keeps himself efficient. Forestry is preËminently a profession for the "soon" man, for it is the steady preparation long in advance, the well-thoughtout plan well stuck to, which in forestry brings success.
In my experience, men differ comparatively little in mere ability, in the quality of the mental machine, through which the spirit works. Nine times out of ten, it is not ability which brings success, but persistence and enthusiasm, which are usually, but not always, the same as vision and will. We all have ability enough to do the things which lie before us, but the man with the will to keep everlastingly at it, and the vision to realize the meaning and value of the results for which he is striving, is the man who wins in nearly every case. This is true in all human affairs, but it is peculiarly true of the Forester and his task, the end of which lies so far ahead.
In a class below me at Phillips-Exeter Academy was a boy who had just entered the school. His great ambition was to play football, and he came to the practise day after day. His abilities, however, were apparently not on the same plane with his ambitions, and his work was so ridiculously poor that he became the laughing stock of the whole school. That, however, troubled him not at all. What held his mind was football. Undiscouraged and undismayed, he kept on playing football until in his last year he became captain of the Exeter football team.
Every man of experience has known many similar cases. It is clear, I think, that the master qualities in achievement are neither luck nor mere ability, but rather enthusiasm and persistence, or vision and will.
In a peculiar sense the Forester depends upon public opinion and public support for the means of carrying on his work, and for its final success. But the attention which the public gives or can give to any particular subject varies, and of necessity must vary, from time to time. Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that the Forester must meet discouragements, checks, and delays, as well as periods of smooth sailing. He should expect them, and should be prepared to discount them when they come. When they do come, I know of no better way of reducing their bad effects than for a man to make allowance for his own state of mind. He who can stand off and look at himself impartially, realizing that he will not feel to-morrow as he feels to-day, has a powerful weapon against the temporary discouragements which are necessarily met in any work that is really worth while. Progress is always in spirals, and there is always a good time coming. There is nothing so fatal to good work as that flabby spirit under which some weak men try to hide their inefficiency—the spirit of "What's the use?"It has been the experience of every Forester, as he goes about the country, to be told that a certain mountain is impassable, that a certain trail can not be travelled, that a certain stream can not be crossed, and to find that mountain, trail, and stream can all be passed with little serious difficulty by a man who is willing to try. Most things said to be impossible are so only in the mind of the man whose timidity or inertness keeps him from making the attempt. The whole story of the establishment and growth of the United States Forest Service is a story of the doing of things which the men who did them were warned in advance would be impossible. Usually the thing which "can't be done" is well worth trying.
Perhaps I ought to add that I am not urging the young Forester to disregard local public opinion without the best of reasons, or to rush his horse blindly into the ford of a swollen stream. Good sense is the first condition of success. I am merely saying that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, when a thing ought to be done it can be done, if the effort is made with that idea in mind.
All this is but one way of saying that the Forester should be his own severest taskmaster. The Forester must keep himself up to his own work. In no other profession, to my knowledge, is a man thrown so completely on his own responsibility. The Forester often leads an isolated life for weeks or months at a time, seeing the men under whom he works only at distant intervals. Because he is so much his own master, the responsibility which rests upon him is peculiarly his own, and must be met out of the resources within himself.
The training of a Forester should lead him to be practical in the right sense of that word, which emphatically is not the sense of abandoning standards of work or conduct in order to get immediate results. The "practical" men with whom the Forester must do his work—lumbermen, cattlemen, sheepmen, settlers, forest users of all kinds—are often by very much his superiors in usable knowledge of the details of their work. Their opinions are entitled to the most complete hearing and respect. There is no other class of men from whose advice the Forester can so greatly profit if he chooses to do so. He is superior to them, if at all, only in his technical knowledge, and in the broader point of view he has derived from his professional training. It is of the first importance that the young Forester should know these men, should learn to like and respect them, and that he should get all the help he can from their knowledge and practical experience. The willingness to use the information and assistance which such men were ready to give has more than once meant the difference between failure and success.
The young Forester, like other young men, is likely to be impatient. I do not blame him for it. Rightly directed, his impatience may become one of his best assets. But it will do no harm to remember, also, that the human race has reached its present degree of civilization and advancement only step by step, and that it seems likely to proceed in very much the same way hereafter. As a general rule, results slowly and painfully accomplished are lasting. The results to be achieved in forestry must be lasting if they are to be valuable.
In general, the men with whom the Forester deals can adopt, and in many cases, ought to adopt, a new point of view but slowly. To fall in love at first sight with theories or policies is as rare as the same experience is between persons. As a rule, an intellectual conviction, however well founded, must be followed by a period of incubation and growth before it can blossom into a definite principle of action, before the man who holds it is ready to work or fight in order to carry it out. There is a rate in the adoption of new ideas beyond which only the most unusual circumstances will induce men's minds to move. Forestry has gone ahead in the United States faster than it ever did in any other land. If it proceeds a little less rapidly, now that so much of the field has been won, there will be no reason for discouragement in that.
AS A SUBORDINATE OFFICER
Necessarily the young Forester will begin as a subordinate. How soon he will come to give orders of his own will depend on how well he executes the orders of his superior. In particular, it will depend on whether he requires to be coddled in doing his work, or whether he is willing and able to stand on his own feet. The man for whom every employer of men is searching, everywhere and always, is the man who will accept the responsibility for the work he has to do—who will not lean at every point upon his superior for additional instructions, advice, or encouragement.
There is no more valuable subordinate than the man to whom you can give a piece of work and then forget about it, in the confident expectation that the next time it is brought to your attention it will come in the form of a report that the thing has been done. When this master quality is joined to executive power, loyalty, and common sense, the result is a man whom you can trust. On the other hand, there is no greater nuisance to a man heavily burdened with the direction of affairs than the weak-backed assistant who is continually trying to get his chief to do his work for him, on the feeble plea that he thought the chief would like to decide this or that himself. The man to whom an executive is most grateful, the man whom he will work hardest and value most, is the man who accepts responsibility willingly, and is not continually under his feet.
AS A SUPERIOR OFFICER
The principles of effective administrative work have never, so far as I know, been adequately classified and defined. When they come to be stated one of the most important will be found to be the exact assignment of responsibility, so that whatever goes wrong the administrative head will know clearly and at once upon whom the responsibility falls. This is one of the reasons why, as a rule, boards and commissions are far less effective in getting things done than single men with clear-cut authority and equally clear-cut responsibility. Another principle, so well known that it has almost become a proverb, is to delegate everything you can, to do nothing that you can get someone else to do for you. But the wisdom of letting a good man alone is less commonly understood. It is sometimes as important for the superior officer not to worry his subordinate with useless orders as it is for the subordinate not to harass his superior with useless questions.
Let a good man alone. Give him his head. Nothing will hold him so rigidly to his work as the feeling that he is trusted. Lead your men in their work, and above all make of your organization not a monarchy, limited or unlimited, but a democracy, in which the responsibility of each man for a particular piece of work shall not only be defined but recognized, in which the credit for each man's work, so far as possible, shall be attached to his own name, in which the opinions and advice of your subordinates are often sought before decisions are made; in a word, a democracy in which each man feels a personal responsibility for the success of the whole enterprise.
The young Forester may be years removed from the chance to apply these principles in practice, but since no superior officer can put them into fruitful effect without the coÖperation of his subordinates, it is well that they should be known at both ends of the line.
A PUBLIC SERVANT
I repeat that whether a Forester is engaged in private work or in public work, whether he is employed by a lumberman, an association of lumbermen, a fishing and shooting club, the owner of a great estate, or whether he is an officer of a State or of the Nation, by virtue of his profession he is a public servant. Because he deals with the forest, he has his hand upon the future welfare of his country. His point of view is that which must control its future welfare. He represents the planned and orderly development of its resources. He is the representative also of the forest school from which he graduates, and of his profession. Upon the standards which he helps to establish and maintain, the welfare of these, too, directly depends.
