Rural free-delivery service is no longer in the experimental stage; it has become a fixed policy.  The results following its introduction have fully justified the Congress in the large appropriations made for its establishment and extension.  The average yearly increase in post-office receipts in the rural districts of the country is about two per cent.  We are now able, by actual results, to show that where rural free-delivery service has been established to such an extent as to enable us to make comparisons the yearly increase has been upward of ten per cent.

On November 1, 1902, 11,650 rural free-delivery routes had been established and were in operation, covering about one-third of the territory of the United States available for rural free-delivery service.  There are now awaiting the action of the Department petitions and applications for the establishment of 10,748 additional routes.  This shows conclusively the want which the establishment of the service has met and the need of further extending it as rapidly as possible.  It is justified both by the financial results and by the practical benefits to our rural population; it brings the men who live on the soil into close relations with the active business world; it keeps the farmer in daily touch with the markets; it is a potential educational force; it enhances the value of farm property, makes farm life far pleasanter and less isolated, and will do much to check the undesirable current from country to city.

It is to be hoped that the Congress will make liberal appropriations for the continuance of the service already established and for its further extension.

Few subjects of more importance have been taken up by the Congress in recent years than the inauguration of the system of nationally-aided irrigation for the arid regions of the far West.  A good beginning therein has been made.  Now that this policy of national irrigation has been adopted, the need of thorough and scientific forest protection will grow more rapidly than ever throughout the public-land States.

Legislation should be provided for the protection of the game, and the wild creatures generally, on the forest reserves.  The senseless slaughter of game, which can by judicious protection be permanently preserved on our national reserves for the people as a whole, should be stopped at once.  It is, for instance, a serious count against our national good sense to permit the present practice of butchering off such a stately and beautiful creature as the elk for its antlers or tusks.

So far as they are available for agriculture, and to whatever extent they may be reclaimed under the national irrigation law, the remaining public lands should be held rigidly for the home builder, the settler who lives on his land, and for no one else.  In their actual use the desert-land law, the timber and stone law, and the commutation clause of the homestead law have been so perverted from the intention with