THE EFFECT OF ADVANCING VALUES 



729 



practice economy and avoid waste in 

 the management of their business. 



When the individual becomes the 

 owner of any resource, it requires no 

 legislation to compel him to take care 

 of his own. Zealous but impractical 

 advocates of conservation, newspaper 

 and magazine muck rakers, political 

 demagogues and insurgent otfic5-seek- 

 ers, have in late years joined in a chorus 

 of indignation and condemnation of 

 American lumliermen as predatory rob- 

 ber barons, united in law-defying com- 

 binations, branded as undesirable citi- 

 zens, public enemies wasting and ex- 

 ploiting the people's inheritance of for- 

 est resources. Consumers of forest 

 products, childlike in their require- 

 ments, want to eat their cake and have 

 it too ; demanding cheap lumber which 

 means the rapid slaughter of our lum- 

 ber-making forest trees. Any concerted 

 limitation of the production of lumber 

 to correspond with the demand is 

 looked upon as a crime, a violation of 

 the Sherman anti-conservation law. 

 The cheapest commodity in the United 

 States today is forest trees, suitable for 

 saw logs, the present price of stumpage, 

 whether it be hard wood or soft wood, 

 is only a fraction of what it would cost 

 if the trees had to be grown like any 

 other soil crop. 



Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for- 

 est trees in this country had only a 

 nominal value and lumber prices were 

 based on the cost of bringing the logs 

 from the woods to the mill and con- 

 verting them into lumber, the value of 

 the raw material or stumpage being 

 only a few cents per thousand feet. 

 Under such conditions only the large 

 mature trees easily accessible and of 

 good quality were harvested by lumber- 

 men and all inferior or defective logs 

 were left in the woods to rot or add 

 fuel to recurring forest fires. Good 

 lumber was so cheap that low grades 

 could not be sold for the cost of pro- 

 duction and freight charges to points 

 of consumption. 



The need or importance of conserv- 

 ing our forest resources received little 

 thought or consideration. Timber lands 

 were cheap and abundant. The magnifi- 

 cent forests of the Pacific Coast States 



were just being explored, cruised and 

 estimated, revealing a supposed limit- 

 less supply of the finest lumber-making 

 trees in the world. The yellow pine 

 of the Southern States was first begin- 

 ning to attract the attention of north- 

 ern lumbermen whose stumpage hold- 

 ings in the white pine forests of Michi- 

 gan, Wisconsin and Minnesota began 

 to show signs of exhaustion, and a 

 corresponding enhancement in stump- 

 age values. The development of these 

 new forest resources kept lumber 

 cheap. Select timber lands selling at 

 iwo to five dollars an acre, yielding ten 

 to twenty thousand feet to the acre, 

 made a choice pine or oak tree scaling 

 one thousand feet worth less than fifty 

 cents. 



Contrast the nominal value placed on 

 this superb forest tree that had been 

 growing and maturing for a hundred 

 or two hundred years, surviving the 

 hazard of devastating cyclones, insect 

 ravages and destructive forest fires, 

 with the cost of such a tree, if planted 

 by the hands of human foresters, the 

 land on which it grew progressively 

 taxed for a hundred years, the capital 

 invested in the forest farm doubling it- 

 self every ten years through interest 

 and taxes compounded. Suppose our 

 forest resources were exhausted and 

 the American farmer, forester or lum- 

 berman should undertake to grow for- 

 est trees for profit, assuming that lands 

 suitable for forest growth could be ob- 

 tained for $5.00 an acre and, allowing 

 $3.00 an acre for planting and pro- 

 tecting the young trees from fire, he 

 would start with an investment of $<S.00 

 an acre, the first year. In ten years his 

 investment has doubled by the addition 

 of annual taxes and interest charges 

 compounded. At the end of ten years 

 his investment is $16.00 an acre. Con- 

 tinuing this calculation, at the end of 

 seventy years, the sons or grandsons of 

 the original planters would find their 

 inherited holdings in growing timlier 

 representing an investment of $1,000.00 

 an acre ; and, suppose the forest crop 

 has now reached sufficient maturitv to 

 be manufactured into lumber, having 

 escaped the hazard of fires and cvclones 

 and yielding 20.000 feet of merchant- 



