288 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



I promised to give two broader views of relations which I hoped 

 would be clearing. About a year ago I called on the representative 

 of a London house in Seattle, there to buy lumber. On the wall 

 of his ofifice was a map of the world with the trade routes on it. The 

 Douglas fir region was a spot on the map with him. Mexico was just 

 as real, and South America, both with supplies of timber. And that 

 great reservoir on the Armour River was in his mind also. Men of 

 some nationality in the not distant future are going to open up that 

 country, and set the product afloat in the world's markets. Now I 

 ask, can you, in view of these facts, begrudge to our Douglas fir 

 country realization on its resources while in some great foreign mar- 

 kets it has nearly a free field, and is it not a fair inference from this 

 and other circumstances that the price of lumber in our owui country 

 will long be kept at such levels that intensive forestry will be finan- 

 cially possible only locally? 



For the other view I take you to my home country. Years ago in 

 Maine, as I first began to consider these matters, I thought in terms 

 of the timber supplies of single water sheds. Here, for instance, was 

 a paper mill on a river, and the question seemed to be how long the 

 resources of that river would last that enterprise. But as I watched 

 things, I found those men devising schemes I had not thought of. 

 They began to use the railways for hauling timber. They hauled both 

 ways across the State and by rail and water from three provinces in 

 Canada, and the problem I saw was not a local but a regional one. 



For twenty years past Maine has been realizing heavily on her 

 timber. The trade has been profitable ; the people have thrived on it, 

 but a Simon-pure conservationist, perhaps, might have objected be- 

 cause, I suppose, the growth of the country, in some items and in 

 some areas at least, was being more than harvested. 



But what is happening today? A wealthy, ingenious, and ambitious 

 people have cut a canal through the isthmus that connected the two 

 Americas, and now lumber from the West Coast of the country is 

 beginning to flow through there, and the prospect is that before very- 

 long it will- displace Maine lumber in some markets, and Maine forests 

 the people of Maine during the last twenty years had held themselves 

 will have a chance to rest up and accumulate resources. Now, suppose 

 down to a quantity calculated by somebody to be the volume of the 

 State's production, what do you suppose they would think of them- 

 selves? 



