14 



HARDWOOD RECORD 



Selling Lumber in Times Like the Present. 



It is Dot easy to make advantageous sales of lumber in liberal 

 quantities at the present time. A good many lumbermen seem to 

 be convinced that it is impossible to crowd sales, and are merely 

 ' ' Ij-ing low ' ' without making any serious effort to do much business. 

 Probably fully half the traveling lumber salesmen are laid ofE. 

 Letter writing has gone into ' ' innocuous desuetude ' ' and about 

 three lumbermen out of four are showing up at their offices very 

 late in the morning and going home very early in the afternoon, 

 spending the rest of their time playing golf or seven-up. 



On the contrary the energetic industrious minority have doubled 

 their efforts and are working like the deuce to secure trade, and 

 being rewarded to a considerable extent. The experience table of 

 the editor of the Hardwood Record demonstrates that the average 

 cost of calling on a prospective customer to sell lumber is approxi- 

 mately $2 a visit. This table also shows that the average duplicate 

 letter, including postage under a two-cent stamp costs five cents. It 

 can therefore be easily figured out that a lumberman can reach by 

 mail forty prospective customers at the same cost entailed in reach- 

 ing one prospective customer with a salesman. There is no gain- 

 saying the fact that the visit of an intelligent salesman is more 

 effective than any letter, but the chances of effecting a sale from 

 forty intelligent, forceful, convincing letters are greater than the 

 possibilities of one call made by the average traveling salesman. 



Therefore it is that the alert minority of hardwood manufactur- 

 ers and jobbers are pretty thoroughly experimenting at the present 

 time in selling lumber by mail, and only personally visiting regular 

 favorite customers occasionally. They are utilizing the Hardwood 

 Record's list of wholesale consumers, and sending out ten, fifty, a 

 hundred or five hundred letters daily about particular woods which 

 they are desirous of moving, and which they know by the evidence 

 at hand are ordinarily consumed by the houses to whom they write. 

 These people report that they are digging up a considerable quan- 

 tity of new trade at very fair prices. 



The project of securing business by mail is no new one, but very 

 few lumber sales managers have ever evolved a comprehensive and 

 .iiiiirate system of letter writing on the "follow-up" plan. The 

 Hardwood Record's regular bulletin service of buyers is at the dis- 

 jiiisal of every lumber advertiser in the paper, including specific sug- 

 gestions covering letters to be issued in duplicate form, which can- 

 not be recognized as of a circular nature. 



certain lumbermen are heavily scored, must be flatly and honestly 

 denied. 



However, the people must be made to realize the importance 

 of this forestry legislation and work, that they may instruct 

 their senators and representatives in no uncertain terms, to pur- 

 sue a rational course. Then and only then will measures intro- 

 duced at Washington be permitted to meet ultimate fulfillment. 



Why Is It? 



For some unknown reason all forestry legislation introduced 

 into Congress has met with determined opposition. In spite of 

 the powerful and intelligent adherents which the cause has gradu- 

 ally enlisted, every step of the reform movements advocated so 

 earnestly by President Roosevelt, Hon. Hoke Smith and others, 

 have been fought "tooth and nail." Repeated attempts have 

 been made to discredit the work of the Forest Service. Senators 

 Hcyburn, Clark, Carter, Patterson and others have been ring- 

 leaders in this opposition, while in the House Speaker Cannon has 

 been openly and frankly opposed to further forest legislation, 

 declaring that we've always had timber enough to cover us and 

 keep us warm, so he "guesses" we always will; anyhow, he 

 doesn't believe in "borrowing trouble." 



It is evident that the only way in which great forestry move- 

 ments may be carried forward to ultimate success is by enlisting 

 a superabundance of popular sentiment in support of them. The 

 ftisvement should be given an immense impetus by the recent remark- 

 able conference of executives held at Washington to consider the per- 

 petuation of our national resources. This great work will lafgely 

 devolve upon the press of the country, and will take constant, 

 steady hammering away to accomplish it. Stuart Edward White 

 had a recent forceful article on ' ' The Fight for the Forests, ' ' in the 

 American Magazine; and Emerson Hough, writtng in May Every- 

 body's on "The Slaughter of the Trees" — will no doubt succeed in 

 opening the eyes of a large number of intelligent citizens to a series 

 of important and indisputable facts regarding the timber supply, 

 though sundry statements toward the close of the article, wherein 



Fire Losses. 



The recrudescence of fire losses is noted in every period of l>uvi 

 ness depression, and the present one is no exception. Every day 

 records the destruction of some sawmill or woodworking plant. The 

 frequencj- with which these fires occur would almost lead one to con- 

 cede that the moral hazard is a pretty serious one in times of busi- 

 ness depression, but this fact is far from true in the lumber and 

 general woodworking industries. The chief reason for disastrous 

 fires lies in the fact that many plants are idle and watchmen's 

 efforts are relaxed or in some cases dispensed with entirely, for the 

 sake of reducing the cost on idle mills. Again, during a time when 

 plants are not run, or are running short hours with diminished 

 labor crews, the "housekeeping" becomes bad and the opportunity 

 for fire increases. In all the sawmill, lumber and woodworking plant 

 fires of the last three months there is scarcely a suspicion attacheil 

 to one of them that it was of incendiary origin. Fire losses during 

 dull periods seem to come about "just naturally." 



Report of the Forester. 



The report of the United States Forest Service for the fiscal year 

 ended June 30, 1907, together with an outline of plans for the work 

 of the current year, has been issued by Hon. Gifford Pinchot, Chief 

 Forester. 



The Service has succeeded in effecting a far more active and 

 intelligent realization on the part of people throughout the entire 

 country of the practical importance of forest preservation and the 

 necessity of concerted action to avert the calamity of an exhausted 

 timber supply; and it has awakened in the mind of the general 

 public a growing discernment of the great principle that our national, 

 welfare demands the conservation of all natural resources, including 

 the forests themselves, of water for agriculture, domestic supply, 

 power, and navigation, which the forests greatly influence, and 

 of the soil which the forests hold in place. 



Had the Forest Service failed to accomplish a single other thing, 

 its work for the year would have been a great one, but in adilition 

 to this educational campaign which it has vigorously conducted, 

 it has promoted a marked growth in the support of the national 

 forest policy by the people of the West, who have taken hold of it 

 and made it their own; an increase of the national forests now 

 held and managed by the government to serve the best interests 

 of the people, not only now but in the future — from 107,000,000 to 

 150,000,000 acres; the e.\tension and improvement of the system of 

 inspection of existing national forests and others, through which the 

 office of the Forester is kept informed as to the efficiency of work 

 in the field; six inspection districts with headquarters at Missoula, 

 Denver, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Portland; 

 a radical change of organization which insures closer cooperation 

 of allied lines of work, and better control by the chief forester 

 through a large reduction in the number of administrative heads 

 reporting directly to him ; closer touch between office and field work 

 in that supervisors are now brought from their forests to fill for 

 definite periods the positions of the six district foresters at Wash- 

 ington. Notable success has been achieved in the control of grazing 

 in forests, with satisfaction to owners of stock entitled to use the 

 ranges and to the protection and improvements of the tracts; there 

 has also been a striking reduction in fire loss, and better mctho.Is 

 for securing reproduction after lumbering have been applied; r\; 

 ments in seasoning and treating chestnut and arbor vitae pol( - 

 been conducted in cooperation with the American Telephone au.l 

 graph Company, and hemlock, tamarack, fir, larch, and otln i 

 have been treated and laid in cooperation with several railway 

 panics, while fence posts and wood paving have been studied in 

 prr.etical and systematic ways. 



