EDITORIAL COMMENT 135 



gently carried out, as seems to be assured, it cannot fail to result both 

 in decreased cost of lumber production and in better conditions for 

 labor. The adoption of efficiency management means, when faithfully 

 carried out, the replacement of prejudice by scientific inquiry into 

 every factor that affects the industry. The methods of labor manage- 

 ment, selling management, finance, and supply of raw material must 

 therefore receive careful scrutiny. If this scrutiny goes deep enough, 

 it must inevitably reveal that in labor management permanence of in- 

 dustry in each locality is of prime importance, in order that workmen 

 may have the normal family life, now impossible in most of our North- 

 western logging industry. In the field of sales management it must 

 reveal that the expense of efficient sales organization will be better 

 distributed if supplies of forest products are permanent, making pos- 

 sible constant growth and progress within established organizations. 

 It may also reveal that the only safe limitation of output, which is 

 necessary to prevent destructive competition and too merciless price 

 cutting, is limitation at the source of supply of new material — in the 

 forest this means Hmitation to the continuous productive capacity of 

 each forest unit. Likewise finance and supply of raw material are 

 intimately related to forest policy. Innumerable sawmills have been 

 built in the past subject to a depreciation rate of lo to 20 per cent, 

 due to early exhaustion of raw material. In most cases the building 

 of fewer mills would have resulted in a longer operating life for each 

 mill built and saved vast depreciation losses. Depreciation due to ex- 

 haustion of raw material can be completely eliminated by limiting mill- 

 building in each locality to what the forests of that locality will produce 

 continuously and then working those forests for continuous produc- 

 tion. These statements indicate only a few ways in which scientific 

 management of the lumber industry must lead toward the proper, hand- 

 ling of the forests for continuous .supplies of raw material, just as the 

 far-sighted U. S. Steel Corporation has provided for raw material for 

 a century or so into the future, in order to be certain its plant invest- 

 ment need not be written off the books for want of raw material — a 

 thing that happens every day to one or another of our sawmilling con- 

 cerns. Of course, we do not hold that continuous production will 

 necessarily be carried on by lumber companies themselves. We do 

 hold that this policy must appear essential to enlightened concerns, and 

 such concerns should see to it that if forest production is not financially 

 practicable for them the lands will get into hands for whom it will be 

 practicable — in many cases the Federal Government, in others the 

 State, and in still others perhaps some large private corporation. 



