for their protection and development.
Accordingly, when the act transferring the National Forests to the
charge of the newly created United States Forest Service in the
Department of Agriculture was passed early in 1905, they were ready for
the responsibility.

The principles which they had formulated and which they now began to
apply had been summed up by Roosevelt in the statement "that the rights
of the public to the natural resources outweigh private rights and must
be given the first consideration." Until the establishment of the Forest
Service, private rights had almost always been allowed to overbalance
public rights in matters that concerned not only the National Forests,
but the public lands generally. It was the necessity of having this new
principle recognized and adopted that made the way of the newly created
Forest Service and of the whole Conservation movement so thorny. Those
who had been used to making personal profit from free and unrestricted
exploitation of the nation's natural resources would look only with
antagonism on a movement which put a consideration of the general
welfare first.

The Forest Service nevertheless put these principles immediately into
practical application. The National Forests were opened to a regulated
use of all their resources. A law was passed throwing open to settlement
all land in the National Forests which was found to be chiefly valuable
for agriculture. Hitherto all such land had been closed to the settler.
Regulations were established and enforced which favored the settler
rather than the large stockowner. It was provided that, when conditions
required the reduction in the number of head of stock grazed in any
National Forest, the vast herds of the wealthy owner should be affected
before the few head of the small man, upon which the living of his
family depended. The principle which excited the bitterest antagonism of
all was the rule that any one, except a bona fide settler on the land,
who took public property for private profit should pay for what he got.
This was a new and most unpalatable idea to the big stock and sheep
raisers, who had been accustomed to graze their animals at will on the
richest lands of the public forests, with no one but themselves a penny
the better off thereby. But the Attorney-General of the United States
declared it legal to make the men who pastured their cattle and sheep in
the National Forests pay for this privilege; and in the summer