IS 



HARDWOOD RECORD 



March 25, 1919 



office buildings and similar structures are to be started in many 

 large cities in the near future. Unquestionably the marked reduc- 

 tion in steel prices will greatly increase this tendency, and if the 

 conferences at Washington work out to a real stabilizing of prices 

 as it is anticipated they will, the main cause for hesitancy and 

 uncertainty as to immediate future values of building materials 

 will have been removed. 



In other lines of hardwood consumption the artificial stimulation 

 of values which has held in building materials is not so apparent 

 and the matter still rests on the basis of economic laws. In this 

 connection the supply end in the balance is decreasing in hardwoods 

 and the demand end is increasing, a combination that surely does 

 not give much promise for lower prices. In all the normal fields of 

 commercial wood products manufactured, this relationship is con- 

 tinuing and the call today is very much better than it was a month 

 ago. 



To boil down the situation it is just this: There is a cycle be- 

 tween producing cost- and high cost of living, producing cost being 

 maintained primarily by high wages. The barrier in the way of 

 reconstruction processes has been that neither side was willing to 

 concede that he should be the one to start prices downward. At 

 the same time it is apparent that either labor or employers must 

 make the initial sacrifice, for one or the other must make a sacrifice 

 in order to start the wheel revolving in the opposite direction to 

 what it has been going under war stimulation. It is conceded by 

 employers that labor cannot be expected to bear the burden of 

 initial loss. Therefore it is apparent that employers must take the 

 initiative and shoulder what burden may result through arbitrarily 

 reducing the price of commodities and goods which are responsible 

 for the present high level of living cost. When this has been ac- 

 complished to a degree sufficient to favorably affect the cost of 

 living, then will come the time when the employes must respond 

 with a reduced scale, though one at a level sufficiently high as to 

 enable them to maintain present advanced living standards that 

 have been attained during the war. 



With the cycle of development thus started, it will be maintained 

 automatically. Thus it is apparent that those producing groups 

 whose cost price has risen much more rapidly in proportion than 

 selling cost must make their positions clear before the country at 

 large so that present valuations on goods may be accepted as stable. 

 Producing groups whose selling price has been stimulated by war 

 production much more rapidly than cost price, must give a similar 

 clarification of their condition with proper readjustment of selling 

 price so that the public may get goods for their real value and 

 have an assured basis to work upon. 



In the list of sixty-two standard commodities in daily use in vast 

 quantities, the cost at this date as compared to the same date in 

 1913, shows a percentage of increase running from ten or eleven 

 per cent up to 200 or 300 per cent. It can be assumed that in a 

 general way the increased cost of producing these various items is 

 governed by the same factors; thus the percentage of increase in 

 the cost of producing should be fairly uniform through the entire 

 list. It is evident, therefore, that increase in price is not neces- 

 sarily in direct relationship to the increase in cost of production. 

 The conclusion is that many items of vast importance in domestic 

 and foreign demand can and should be decreased in price without 

 actual loss to the producers whereas in many other cases excessive 

 increase in cost of production has been solely responsible for in- 

 crease in selling price and the latter cannot justifiably be decreased 

 until the cost is decreased. 



The present conferences on prices being carried on at Washing- 

 ton are far more important in their relationship to industry than 

 anything which has transpired since the beginning of war organiza- 

 tion. The results obtained so far have been encouraging and it is 

 to be hoped that the work will be speeded up so that the country 

 at large may within a very short time arrive at a basis for figuring 

 costs of commodities that is stable and certain and which will give 

 a definite guarantee of prices as low as actual supply and demand 

 will permit. 



An Enormous Junk Pile 



OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT has been made that the govern- 

 ment intends to abandon the gun factory on Neville island in 

 the Ohio river below Pittsburgh. The building will be torn down 

 and the land turned back to its original owners, thus completing 

 one more chapter in the history of the spoils of war. That gun 

 plant was designed to cost $150,000,000. Buildings were to cover 

 between 700 and 800 acres, and some of the heaviest machinery 

 in the world was to be part of the equipment. Guns were to be« 

 manufactured that would weigh 510,000 pounds each, much larger 

 than any gun used in the late war. The working force at the plant 

 was expected to be 20,000 men. 



The project was formed as part of our war plans. It was known 

 that two or three years must pass before the factory could be in 

 working order; but in case the war should continue that long, it was 

 the intention to have something ready that would be worth while. 

 The whole scheme has now been abandoned, and what has been 

 spent on the works will be a total loss, except what may be sal- 

 vaged from the wrecking of the buildings. Large as that loss must 

 be, it is moderate when compared to the loss due to airplane schemes 

 which fell short of expectation. Perhaps the smallest loss, of all 

 the big losses due to unused war material, is chargeable against 

 lumber, because what lumber was left over when the armistice was 

 signed was salable at its real value, and markets were everywhere. 

 But eighteen-inch guns and the buildings and machinery for mak- 

 ing them are not easily sold. 



The Crosstie Situation 



DISCUSSION OF THE CROSSTIE SITUATION is active at 

 present. Wholesale operators are dissatisfied with the method 

 of buying that is followed by the railroad administration. The 

 part of the policy of purchase which is causing most complaint is 

 the order that ties shall be purchased as near as possible to the right 

 of way of the particular road making the purchase. On the face 

 of it, that looks like a good plan, because it does away with long 

 hauls; but it so happens that crossties are produced in much larger 

 numbers in some parts of the country than in others, and some rail- 

 roads which use many cannot buy them near their own lines at an 

 advantageous price. 



Wholesalers complain that their business has been hurt or ruined, 

 because heretofore it had been their function to bring ties together, 

 know just where the}' could lay their hands on them, and be pre- 

 pared to sell them to any road that needed them; but under the 

 new policy, the buyers go directly to the producers in the vicinity 

 where the ties are needed, and buy there. 



The situation does not seem to be very clear except in one point, 

 namely, that the wholesale dealers in ties have been knocked out 

 of the business which they were formerly able to do. 



Information is not clear as to whether railroads are getting all 

 the ties they need at satisfactory prices, and whether the individual 

 tie makers can sell their product at satisfactory prices. If the 

 railroads want more than they are getting, the inference is that 

 they need the help of wholAsalers in locating additional supplies; 

 and if the ties are costing too much, and the public will be called 

 upon to pay the difference, some change of method would seem 

 advisable. But it does not appear that the railroad administration 

 is making any complaint, though, according to report, ties are 

 about to be shipped by water from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. 



It is no secret that the government 's management of the rail- 

 roads is receiving a lot of criticism, and the gist of the most fre- 

 quent complaints is that the business, under government manage- 

 ment, is not being carried on so economically nor so efficiently as 

 it would be by the owners. Too many experiments are being tried 

 in order to test some man's theory, and when the experiment works 

 out badly, the public pays the bill. Possibly, tie buying is one of 

 the theories being tried out. 



The pedagogues who used to teach country schools made ink of a 

 concoction of chestnut bark, water, and nails. 



