TWENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING. 47 



One good thus excludes another good. With respect to the reforesta- 

 tion of our hills, the freedom a man has to do what he jileases with his 

 own stands in the way of improvement, except through education and 

 agitation, that shall teach land owners their true interests. A consider- 

 able percentage of the soil is going to the ocean every year, and the 

 amount is all the time increasing from the destruction of the forests, 

 especially on the hill-tops and the mountain-sides. Individuals, of course, 

 consider their immediate interests, and generally let posterity look out for 

 itself. But, even now, the farmers can not afford to permit the annual 

 washing away of the best elements of the soil into the brooks and rivers 

 to be carried into the great lakes that encircle three sides of the state. 

 Agitation and education, with perhaps an exemption of all reforested 

 acres from taxation by the state, must be depended upon to induce the 

 public to voluntarily take such action in this matter as an enlightened 

 self-interest dictates. 



Aside from the conservation of the soil, the agreeable modification of 

 the climate, and beautifying and making more valuable our agricultural 

 lands by the wise enlargement of forest areas, there is the question of 

 timber supplies staring us in the face. As yet we have not known what 

 " a dearth of timber " means. We have not realized the evils, except in 

 the possession of a lot of millionaires, of stimulating by taxation and 

 indirect bounties the rapid destruction of our forest areas. Only now, 

 when our magnificent forests are well-nigh exhausted, do we begin to 

 think about a change of policy in this regard. But we can not escape the 

 fact that every human being, to make life better worth living, must have 

 timber in some form or other for protection and comfort — that our shelter 

 requires timber, the fioors we walk on, the chairs we sit on, the tables we 

 eat from, the conveyances we use, the implements needed to carry on the 

 farms — our cradles and our coffins — all, and for all time, must make a 

 demand upon the timber supply of the state and the nation. 



When people talk, as they sometimes do, of the inexhatistible forests of 

 any given section of the country, they fail to realize that the sawing 

 capacity of northern mills could in twelve months convert all the 

 merchantable pine in Georgia into lumber, and in six months could use 

 up the pine of Florida. 



Not many years hence the great lumber forests of this country will be 

 things of the past. Then the farmer, one fourth to one third of whose 

 acres are covered with growing timber, with a fair proportion of nut- 

 bearing trees, will have not only a valuable windbreak for his crops and 

 cattle, but will surely possess a perennial source of comfort and wealth. 

 Plant hard maples wherever there is a suitable soil. The land in Barry, 

 Eaton, and other counties that has been saved for sugar orchards is now 

 well worth one hundred dollars per acre, while the cleared portion will not 

 bring much more than one third of that sum. Land that was used for 

 pasturage on my father's farm in Vermont, when I was a boy, the original 

 forest having been cleared off, is now covered with second-growth maples 

 and is a splendid sugar orchard, besides being almost, if not quite, as 

 valuable pasture-land as when it was a treeless hillside, and the land is 

 worth five times as much as it was before nature wisely asserted its rights 

 and covered it with a second growth of sugar maple. 



Only through the awakening of an enlightened public sentiment, by 

 agitation and education, is there any hope, under our institutions, of good 

 work being done for forest restoration and preservation. 



