1)48 JOURNAL OF FORT-STRY 



Scotland and France and the Baltic regions, it was only the forests 

 with their dependent industries, the source of income to the local 

 population, that made possible the settlement of the poorer land. 

 Agriculture, and particularly timber growing, are industries of a spe- 

 cial character, and are recognized as such by most prominent econ- 

 omists. No region of any size can deprive itself of near-by sources 

 of food and wood without finding itself at an enormous economic 

 disadvantage. This is especially true of wood, which is a bulky prod- 

 uct and whose cost of transportation over a considerable distance may 

 exceed the cost of the material itself. England, of all countries, if 

 Dr. Compton's assertions were correct, could afford to depend for its 

 timber supply upon its neighbors, such as Scandinavia and Russia. 

 Those countries are much nearer to centers of consumption in Eng- 

 land than are the supplies of timber on the Pacific Coast to our centers 

 of consumption in the East and Middle West. England has un- 

 equalled facilities for cheap water transportation. It is a densely set- 

 tled country and industrially one of the most developed, yet it found 

 itself compelled by circumstances to embark upon a costly reforesta- 

 tion program to grow part of its own timber supplies. We speak 

 here of home grown timber merely as a source of raw material, and 

 leave out the not less important function of the forest which makes it 

 to a large extent a local necessity as a watershed cover and protec- 

 tion to agriculture. Dr. Compton asserts that while there are local 

 shortages of timber there are no local shortages of lumber, evidently 

 meaning that any locality can buy all the lumber it wants. Technically 

 he may be right, and we doubt if there will ever come a time when 

 lumber cannot be bought, no matter where it may have been pro- 

 duced, as long as the buyer is willing and able to pay the price. In 

 this sense there is very seldom an actual physical exhaustion of any 

 particular product, because as long as there are people who can pay 

 the price it will be obtained in some way. 



We do not believe that there will ever be in this country a lumber 

 famine in the sense that lumber cannot be obtained at any price. The 

 shortages of lumber, particularly of certain kinds, will be reflected 

 in prices of lumber. This is the barometer by which we can judge 

 whether the supply is abundant or scarce. This is so self-evident 

 that Dr. Compton himself, evidently forgetting what he said before, 

 admits a "decline in lumber production, because of increasing scarcity 

 of its raw materials . . . facts which everyone can observe" (see 

 point 4) and again, a very unfortunate (for Dr. Compton) admission 



