212 TWENTY-FIRST REPORT. 



timber ci-op cannot be improvised at need. Fifty or a hundred year.s are 

 required to mature a timber crop. When once a deficit in timber makes its 

 appearance, there comes a very long period before the deficit can be made 

 good. The deficit has made its appearance. Directly, it will be obviously 

 serious where now it is only apparent. 



In the meantime we have some 228,500,000 acres of stump land idle, 

 deteriorating, non-productive ; a menace and a liability. In the meantime the 

 boomer booms and the sucker bites, and for every few newly reclaimed acres 

 other ex-forest and ex-farm acres revert to brush or travel away down the 

 rivers. 



The "doctrine of highest use" is too well established to require argument. 

 Its application is simple enough. There should at once be a classification of 

 the idle lands of the country for the purpose of segregating those which can 

 undoubtedly and under present conditions support a profitable agriculture 

 from those lands on which agriculture is now unprofitable or dubious. Let 

 us make it possible for the bona-fide farmer to have a fair chance at the lands 

 which give a fair chance. Let us then put the rest of the logged-off wilderness 

 to work under forest, pending that time when changed conditions or new 

 methods permit the land to be still more profitably utilized. 



Over vast areas where land quality runs unevenly, the forest will be the 

 complement to the farm exactly as the range now complements the ranch, as 

 Europe has proven for five hundred years. 



There will be no controversy between the real farm and the real forest. 

 There will, however, be controversy over a system wliich permits an empire 

 of ex-forests to lie fallow, or spawning pauper farms, to the confusion of the 

 innocent, the increment of the absentee landlord, the impoverishment of the 

 state and the hazard of the nation. 

 Univ. of Michigan, March, 1919. , 



