90 AMEKICAN FOKESTEY 



This is all easy to understand and the fact that forestry has thus far made 

 no closer connection than it has with business would excite no comment if 

 the profession had not professed all along to be doing that very thing. But 

 we have for years past proclaimed ourselves as teachers and missionaries to 

 the lumbermen. We have been profuse with co-operation and advice; oc- 

 casionally a man has gone with a business concern for a few months to show 

 them how to do it, and large claims have been periodically made for the 

 results attained. Time and reflection, however, show these claims to be mainly 

 hollow. Candid foresters today admit that it is a discredit to the profession 

 that so little privately owned land is under their control, and the lumberman, 

 while he grants the soundness and final necessity of the forestry idea, says 

 that as for the actual application of forestry principles to his own property 

 and operations they have got yet to show him. Yet it is forestry in business, 

 good management of the vast area of woodland owned by private individuals 

 and corporations, that really spells abundant timber supplies in the future. 

 Further, since voluntary, co-operative methods are far simpler and cheaper 

 than government ownership or regulation of cutting by law it is up to the 

 forestry profession fully and carefully to work this lead out. There is indeed 

 a vast and important work to be done here. As the proclamation of the 

 national forests and the beginning of their administration was the big work 

 in forestry in the last fifteen years, so the sifting out of all the possibilities 

 of good forestal and financial management on private forest lands is likely 

 to be the big work of the next fifteen. 



FORESTRY AND LUMBERING 



A main reason why forestry has made no more vital connection than it 

 has thus far with lumbering appears to the writer to lie largely in a stilted and 

 overstrained conception of the terms forestry and forester. If so the direct, 

 practical conception outlined some pages back, of the forester as the man in 

 actual control and management of forest land, will serve as an antidote. So 

 far, however, we have strictly denied the application of the term to any man 

 who, outside of the National Forests and certain enterprises and pieces of 

 land, stood in any such relation to forest property. For this course there 

 may indeed have been good and suflScient reason in the i)ast, but it is clearly 

 hampering progress today. Business in large measure is now hospitable to 

 forestry, genuinely seeking to undestand its principles and find out how they 

 may be applied, and the most cordial, thoughtful co-operation is due from the 

 forestry ])rofession. To that end, however, more vital contact and mingling 

 is essential. Business men know, if foresters do not, that men standing out- 

 side of business cannot get a thoroughly effective point of view and are 

 bound to miss essential points. There is a limit beyond which the missionary 

 spirit will not go, when comradeship and appreciation must come in or progress 

 will stop. The true economic condition of the country requires recognition 

 in a toning down from theoretical ideals to the standard of what can actually 

 be done. In a word it is forestry on the level of business, foresters inside of 

 business organizations, and not outside, that from now on will actually do 

 the work. 



In maintaining the present unsatisfactory condition the schools have 



