16 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



industry. It is held by many that taxation is a serious evil, but it is 

 doubtful whether the liunber industry is taxed heavier than others 

 relative to its importance. Tax studies from a different standpoint 

 from any yet made must be had before anything definite can be said 

 on this point. Those so far made are based on the assumption that 

 forestry will always start with a bare tract, and that taxes must, there- 

 fore, accumulate for years at compound interest before income can be 

 received from the investment. As such forest investment is entirely 

 impracticable so far as attacking our forest problems effectively goes, 

 it does not matter much whether our tax systems fit bare tract forestry 

 or not. 



The various problems will be taken up in the order named above. 



1. An overload of standing timber in private hands (about 2200 

 billion feet b. m.).^ This is most serious in the Pacific North- 

 west. At the Forest Industry Conference held in Portland, October 

 24-25, 1916, it was brought out that the supply of mature timber in 

 private hands in the Pacific Northwest is sufficient to last nearly 100 

 years at the present rate of cutting. This condition arose from the 

 over-liberal policy of the Federal Government, faithfully reflecting a 

 public sentiment which, in the past, believed the national resources 

 to be inexhaustible: that immediate development, regardless of rhyme, 

 reason, or stability, was the thing to be had, and that it could be had 

 best by immediate transfer to private ownership. Limibermen and 

 holders of timber in general are emphatically not to be blamed if they 

 accepted the public invitation to take to satiety, almost free of charge. 

 The taking went on until stopped in the period of from about 1895 to 

 1905 by the efforts of a small group of enthusiastic men — the con- 

 servationists — ^working to save a remnant of the public forests to be 

 administered as National Forests on behalf of the public. The debt 

 of the public to this small group has been reasonably well recognized. 

 The enormous benefit to the lumber industry through saving it from this 

 further enormous load of stumpage holding, and through the great 

 increase in the value of western stumpage from 1900 to 1907, due qiiite 

 largely to the removal of the 600 billion feet of National Forest timber 

 from immediate competition with private, has not yet been recognized 

 as it must be in the future. The transfer from public to private hands 

 had continued until, at the present rate of cutting, in the neighborhood 



1 U. S. Dep't of Commerce and Labor. Bureau of Corporations, Part I, Report 

 on Lumber Industry, p. L 



