LUMBERMEN AND LUMBER JOURNALS 



441 



was no healthy public sentiment back of the 

 law. The pine will grow if the fires are 

 kept out, but will not if the fires are not 

 kept out. If the fires are not kept out, it will 

 burn up the small seedlings, the cones are 

 destroyed, and worthless brush will come up. 



The second great obstacle to the adoption 

 of forestry by lumbermen is the question of 

 taxation. There is much agitation in the 

 country for the preservation of forests and 

 for reforestation of cut-over lands. The 

 lumbermen are interested in this question 

 just as much as the forester or the public 

 and hope some solution will be worked out. 

 It takes from seventy-five to eighty years 

 to grow a white pine tree to merchantable 

 size. We are confronted with the fact that 

 we are obliged to pay taxes every year upon 

 a crop that has not been harvested or that 

 may not be harvested twenty years hence. 

 The farmer pays taxes on his land, but he 

 harvests a crop every year. The lumber- 

 man may pay a large amount of taxes before 

 his crop is harvested. The present system 

 of taxation makes scientific logging methods 

 absolutely impossible. We have considered 

 this question from every standpoint, and va- 

 rious plans and methods have been pro- 

 posed. There is before the people of the 

 state of Minnesota a proposed amendment to 

 the constitution, permitting the legislature to 

 enact a special forest land tax law. If there 

 exists sufficient public sentiment in Minnesota 

 that amendment to the constitution will pass. 

 It is very difficult indeed to arouse sufficient 

 interest on the part of the general public to 

 vote in favor of an amendment to the con- 

 stitution. We need to go through a few more 

 fire years such as we have had in the past 

 to arouse public interest to see the necessity 

 of revising the tax laws, and if there is a 

 demand for practical forestry methods we 

 must secure some relief from taxation, or 

 they cannot be undertaken. 



The lumberman is greatly interested in for- 

 estry schools. We are particularly interested 

 in the forestry school of this state in charge 

 of Prof. Samuel B. Green. We look to the 

 foresters that are now being educated to 

 work out these problems for us. The lum- 

 bermen who are now passing — the older gen- 

 eration of lumbermen — who have been en- 

 gaged in business under methods in vogue for 

 the past forty years, cannot be expected to 

 see the necessity for new methods. They cut 

 the timber to supply the demand that existed 

 then, and they did it in the cheapest possible 

 way. It has only been within the past five or 

 six years that the people have come to realize 

 that the timber is not inexhaustible — the older 

 lumbermen now realize it. 



The production of lumber has about reached 

 its maximum. It has greatly declined in Min- 

 nesota. In 1890 the production in Minnesota, 

 Wisconsin, and Michigan was 9,000,000,000 

 feet, and this year it has been less than 

 3,000,000,000 feet, but there has been a great 

 increase of yellow pine in the southern and 

 western states, so that the total production 



in the United States at large last year was 

 greater than ever. It will be about the same 

 this year, but I think it has reached its cli- 

 max. Some reference was made by one of 

 the speakers to the fact that the production 

 was less in 1908 than in 1907. That was due 

 to market conditions. You will remember 

 that we had a panic in 1907, which retarded 

 building operations and which extended its 

 effect into 1908. 



I also wish to refer to a statement made by 

 one of the speakers in reference to a decision 

 by the Maine supreme court. The papers of 

 the country had a great deal to say in re- 

 gard to it. The state of Maine has a pe- 

 culiar law, under which the legislature can 

 ask the opinion of the supreme court regard- 

 ing the constitutionality of any law pro- 

 posed before the law is passed. The state 

 legislature of Maine asked the supreme court 

 if a law providing for putting private lands 

 under certain restrictions would be constitu 

 tional. The supreme court stated that under 

 the conditions mentioned, which would inure 

 to the benefit and welfare of the community 

 at large, such a law would be constitutional, 

 but the law has not been passed, and the 

 constitutionality of it has not been passed 

 upon. Investigating that subject, we find if 

 there is a tendency to restrict cutting on pri- 

 vate lands it is going to result in very serious 

 complications, for this reason : that if the law 

 prohibits the cutting of trees of certain diam- 

 eter, you immediately get into technical for- 

 estry, because different species of timber are 

 of different growths and ages. There are also 

 different requirements for different sizes of 

 logs. We are looking to foresters to work 

 out questions of this kind. 



Personally, I have no fear of a timber fam- 

 ine in the future, because I feel sure that, 

 with the careful study which is being given to 

 the forestry question — especially by the lum- 

 bermen and timber owners — who, by the way, 

 control three-fourths of the timber supply 

 in the United States — they will find some 

 solution of the question ; but it will not be 

 without further advances in values of timber 

 lands, and that will mean a further increase 

 in the price of lumber. Already the price 

 has reached a point where you are using 

 substitutes for lumber. Its principal com- 

 petitor is cement, and the inroads that cement 

 has made upon the lumber industry in the 

 past few years you are all familiar with. A 

 few years ago the average town had wooden 

 sidewalks ; to-day it is a rare thing to find a 

 sidewalk not made of cement, and that change 

 took out of the market the demand for mil- 

 lions of feet of plank. Fences used to be 

 made entirely of lumber ; now they are made 

 of wire. Lumber is still being used for 

 buildings to a great extent. Our buildings 

 are nearly all put up in a hurry in the 

 cheapest possible manner, and we are only 

 just beginning to build them of fireproof ma- 

 terial. The price of lumber has reached a 

 point that even where it costs to build a house 

 of cement a trifle more than it would to build 



