5.'>2 BOARD OF A OKI CULTURE. 



Prof. Troop: Is this reforestation going on only on lands controlled 

 by your commission? 



Prof. Roth: There is to my linowledge no great enterprise of that 

 kind in Michigan. There were a few efforts made, but they were just 

 spoken of. 



Prof. Latta: Does the State in any way encourage the introduction 

 at the present time? 



Prof. Roth: It hasn't done so yet. The Michigan Forestry Commis- 

 sion is today recommending governmental and legislative arrangements. 

 They recommend some legislation which will encourage it. We have the 

 same trouble that you have. Precisely the same trouble. Mr. Freeman 

 will explain this to you. We have a man who does take care of the woods 

 in a most unmerciful way. In one county that I know of, this man— 

 and he was none other than the tax gatherer— and he happened to be a 

 man who understood about logging, and he estimated the timber at so 

 much per thousand and made the tax so high that the man could not 

 afford to pay it. This caused the man to destroy his timber. In another 

 county the taxes were much lower. The first man was taxed from 

 forty to fifty dollars, and the next man was only taxed about eleven 

 or twelve dollars. These were taxed under precisely the same conditions. 



You wonder why we are in such a rush. I will tell you why. It was 

 only a few years ago since we shipped our pine to every State, almost. 

 Kansas City, St. Louis, and those Western places were our principal 

 points of shipment, but today there is not a foot goes outside of the State 

 of Michigan. We have today in the State of Michigan precisely what 

 you have in the State of Indiana. We have in our lumber yards in every 

 town in Michigan, Pacific Coast shingles, red cedar shingles from Seattle, 

 and we have lumber from the Pacific, and we have yellow pine, as you 

 call it. North Carolina pine, and we have cypress. What does this mean? 

 It means that the cost of such things will be very much more than 

 formerly, because of the added expense for bringing them over the hot 

 prairie country, a distance of nearly two thousand miles, through the 

 desert part of the way. You will find more Michigan lumbermen in 

 Norfolk, Virginia, possibly, than any place else in the United States. The 

 amount of capital that was invested in Michigan in lumber In 1890 was 

 just two-fold as great as that Invested in 1900. It seems to me this is 

 very serious. 



There is another point. We who are thus connected believe that it 

 is a waste— a waste of the worst order, a pernicious waste— when the 

 State allows millions of acres of this kind of land to lie as waste land. 

 This land is a nuisance, besides being a waste, for it affords a rendezvous 

 for objectionable people, and whenever times are hard it la a place of 

 more meanness than you have ever dreamed of. When all this comes 



