632 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



the middleman's charge together amount to from $10 to S20 or more 

 per thousand feet. The report might have emphasized more strongly 

 that in natural forest regions the saving of these costs by local produc- 

 tion of timber will pay a high and profitable stumpage price on such 

 production, to say nothing of the additional price which might logically 

 come from adding the stumpage price at the distant source of supply. 

 Or the alternative in such regions may be cheaper lumber and more 

 moderate profits from forestry. In the final analysis, the high cost of 

 lumber across the northern belt of States east of the Mississippi River 

 is in very large part due to failure to keep forest resources of that 

 region on a continuous producing basis. This logic might be followed 

 still further to show that the rapid rise in the cost of lumber due to 

 this local exhaustion brought about the prevailing ideas of the presence 

 of a lumber trust. This idea, together with the opinion that lumber- 

 men have been destroying the resources with which they are entrusted, 

 has been the cause of a large amount of public hostility to the lumber 

 industry, which has gone even so far as to be reflected in legislation, 

 and some other past activities of government designed to embarrass 

 rather than assist the industry. 



One gains the impression from many passages in the report that 

 the author believes the most desirable form of industrial organization 

 is that which insures the most competition. In view of the vast volume 

 of modern thought which seriously questions the economic expediency 

 of the untold wastes of the competitive system, it is somewhat aston- 

 ishing to see it taken as axiomatic that this system should be main- 

 tained without restriction, or even by intervention of the Government 

 if necessary, to prevent more centralized organization. 



The attempt is also made to show that the use of substitutes is 

 cutting into the market very seriously, but the method of attack of this 

 problem by no means makes this opinion conclusive. It is hardly a 

 sound method to urge all materials of construction in place of which 

 wood could be used are in the nature of substitutes for wood. It would 

 be equally sound to say that in all cases where brick might be used 

 instead of the prevailing material — wood — that wood is a substitute. 

 Brick and stone are, in fact, just as time-honored materials of con- 

 struction as is wood, and it is impossible to claim a certain amount of 

 the construction field for one class of material only and to say that 

 others are substitutes. Better economic organization, especially in dis- 



