508 Forestry Quarterly 



lands, there is no intention to limit the work to such lands. The 

 Branch wishes to make use of its special facilities as a nation- 

 wide organization to secure and assemble all the information 

 possible for the use of all foresters in Canada, believing that the 

 success of forestry as a whole is contingent upon the success of 

 each individual unit, and that anything that contributes to this 

 individual success must inevitably benefit the profession as a 

 whole. 



Forestry and National Prosperity 



Now, before explaining the details of the plans of the Forestry 

 Branch in this connection, I wish to refer briefly to two closely 

 related subjects of general interest which are vitally important 

 to foresters, and about which there have appeared lately some 

 very loose statements. One of these is the relations which should 

 exist between the individual and the State. There is a tendency, 

 I think, to attribute the present difficulty in Europe to a conflict 

 of two ideas of national organization, the individualistic and the 

 communistic, alleging that Germany's militarism is the result of 

 the idea of the supremacy of the State and that therefore this 

 idea is itself wrong. Undoubtedly militarism, as this term is com- 

 monly understood, can scarcely be evolved in a State where the 

 individual is held to be supreme, but neither can any other form 

 of activity that requires national cooperative efifort with a long 

 view ahead, and such is the practice of forestry most assuredly. 

 The mistake is made in assuming that militarism inevitably 

 results from the idea of the supremacy of the State. This, I 

 believe, is a false assumption. Whether or not this is a fact, how- 

 ever, these two facts remain, that (1) without a general accep- 

 tance in Canada of the idea that in many respects the interests of 

 the State are supreme over those of the individual, forestry will 

 never be practised in this country; and (2) without the practice 

 of forestry, Canada can never realize more than a very small 

 fraction of its national possibilities. 



This latter statement deserves some further comment, although 

 Mr. MacMillan, in his recent article on "Forestry in Canada," 

 in the Proceedings of the Society of American Foresters, has 

 pointed out in some detail the vital connection existing between 

 our forest resources and our national prosperity. Mr. MacMillan 

 shows that, considering the entire land area of the country, only 



