PRESENT FORESTRY ISSUES 69 



at the foot of the list. Yet Massachusetts, almost at the foot of the list in 

 wood working industries, consumes five hundred and fifty million feet a year 

 of wood. 



The universal use of wood, the way in which it enters into every part of 

 our lives is scarcely appreciated. As I have said before, the advance in cost 

 of no one natural product has so contributed to advance the cost of living 

 as the advance in wood and timber, the direct result of the reckless policy of 

 the government and the reckless pi'actice of the people. 



Wood! the furniture which we use everj' day is made of it; houses are 

 constructed of it; the boats which we use in our pleasure as well as those 

 which we use still in the coastwise trafBc and in the fishing trade are con- 

 structed of it. It enters into every single branch of transportation. The 

 cost of wood used in the cars and the ships which carry the freight is added 

 ultimately to the retail price of the commodities transported. Wood is used 

 in every possible way. The substitution of individual paper cups for tin 

 dippers at the public fountains means just so many more trees to be cut down. 

 The making of matches, the splinters with which we light the fire, the making 

 of lead pencils, is terrible in the destruction of even the smallest sprout 

 that can be made to grow. Tiie paper industry has learned how to conserve 

 the forest tracts which are controlled by them, and to thin them out in many 

 cases scientifically. It is not too much to say that some of the best friends 

 we have are the paper manufacturers controlling large tracts of timber who 

 understand the necessity of conservation. They cannot move their plants. 

 They must conserve an annual crop. The match manufacturer, the pencil 

 maker, does not leave even a piece of wood as large as a pencil point growing 

 on any piece of land over which he gets control. 



Did you ever stop to think how the price of the package is added to the 

 price of the commodity which it contains? The doubling of the price of 

 wood adds to the price of every commodity by increasing the cost of the 

 package. Your ginghams, your dry goods, your cottons and woolens are 

 packed in wooden boxes, and the cost of that package has been doubled by the 

 increase of the cost of wood. Your butter and eggs go to the market in 

 packages of wood ; your fruits, your vegetables, are packed in a square market 

 box, made of wood ; and in the case of almost every commodity of use wooden 

 packages form a part of the completed product, and by the destruction of the 

 forest we thereby raise, not one branch of the cost of living, but by increasing 

 the cost of the package we raise every part of the cost of living. 



It is against that policy that this association is fighting, has fought, and 

 proposes to fight. It should appeal more largely than it does to the American 

 peojile, from the point of view of financial support. 



It cannot be too often insisted upon that while our present policy is 

 destructive and wasteful, the opposite — the conservation policy — may be 

 made not merely helpful but profitable. I need scarcely remind this audience 

 that there are certain towns in Sweden, as well as many towns in the old 

 Schwarzwald in Germany, that pay their entire tow'n taxes out of the product 

 of the local town forests owned by the municipality. Their forests have 

 existed for hundreds and hundreds of years, carefully thinned out year after 

 year, treated scientifically, and bringing in an annual profit. Scientific 

 forestry is profitable today in the oldest parts of the world, much greater 

 than in certain parts of the United States, where "the forest primeval, the 

 shade of the pines and the hemlocks" has disappeared, and through the erosion 

 of the soil in many places has disappeared forever. We have to think not 

 merely of the loss of the timber that once was, but on the slopes of mountains, 

 by the reckless cutting of timber, the loss of soil from erosion, which pre- 

 vents any future timber from being grown there. Aside from the needs of 



