514 Forestry Quarterly 



tion of staff selection is the greatest of all reforms needed to 

 secure efficiency. At least 80 per cent of the forest protection 

 appropriations go into salaries and wages. This alone would 

 demand that an overwhelming attention be devoted to securing 

 a thoroughly effective type of men. But in no other commodity 

 that we purchase is there a possibility of such an enormous varia- 

 tion in quality as in the case of human labor. Were it a question 

 of paying simply double or triple or quadruple prices, we might 

 consider the case serious, but not absolutely hopeless. But when 

 we deal in human labor we can easily find such divergent effi- 

 ciencies as one to twenty or thirty or fifty. I have been inter- 

 ested for a number of years in collecting instances of comparative 

 labor efficiencies in different lines of forest work. A recent and 

 not at all unusual case brought to my attention shows what may 

 easily occur in forest administration. A crew of three able-bodied 

 rangers in a certain portion of a Western province was engaged 

 with a team in getting out logs for a house. At the same time 

 a nearby rancher, who was a cripple, assisted by a boy of about 14 

 and a decrepit team, was getting out similar logs for a building 

 slightly larger, from the same body of timber. The rangers 

 required 15 days to do the work — the rancher 3 days. Consid- 

 ering the difference in the number of men and the wide diver- 

 gence in physical ability of the men and horses of both outfits, 

 I figure the comparative efficiency in this case as being in the 

 ratio of 1 to 15. Now, we may succeed on an efficiency of 50 per 

 cent or even 30 per cent, but an efficiency of only 2 per cent to 

 6 per cent hardly looks very promising, and a great many of our 

 politically appointed forest officers, if honestly and intelligently 

 gauged, would have difficulty in showing any higher grade. Per- 

 sonally, I believe that the obviously ridiculous state of affairs that 

 exists in some of our forest protective organizations, notably 

 in Ontario, cannot possibly continue very much longer, and the 

 Forestry Branch takes the optimistic view that whatever changes 

 occur must be in the direction of greater efficiency and, therefore, 

 better forestry. Consequently, the Branch plans to arrange its 

 work so as to build up a corps of trained foresters within its 

 organization which will be available for the work of technical 

 forest management not only on Dominion lands, when that be- 

 comes feasible from all standpoints, but which, so far as possible, 



