Current Literature 291 



ing and in appraisal of damage the other party will surely and 

 properly insist on having made account of it. 



The mere consideration that the owner of the soil could have 

 used it for other purposes makes it clear that the soil rent is a 

 cost against the timber. The trouble lies in mixing theory and 

 practice, in failing to distinguish between financial methods and 

 practical procedures. A financial method fits every contingency, 

 but under practical conditions we may modify it, consciously 

 deviating from its correct reasoning. 



Whether the Government or anyone else is the owner makes 

 no difference, there is a soil value and a soil rent, but under cir- 

 cumstances the one or the other party may waive consideration of 

 this value. 



The proposition to throw all objective values overboard and 

 relying entirely on subjective ones, utilizing only actual costs 

 and sale value, may lead in many damage cases to utter injustice, 

 when, for instance, at present unsaleable properties are involved. 

 The absurdity of this position appears, indeed, on page 127, when 

 for the Government at least, it is suggested, recovery of damage 

 is precluded because it did not pay anything for the land and 

 was to no expense in producing the stand of trees. 



This may be practical politics, but it is not finance. 



A curious inconsistency might be pointed out in the discussion 

 on taxation, when, on page 141, it is stated "such investments of 

 capital (taxes) add nothing to the value of the property," and on 

 page 144, by taxes "the entire level of values is raised." We take 

 it "value" means something different in the two statements. 



The main trouble in Chapman's book, which seems at the bot- 

 tom of such misconceptions and the involved diction, is its origi- 

 nal idea of reducing financial accounting to the bookkeeper's 

 accounting. In no business is this customary or practical, and 

 especially not in a business in which the time element is so promi- 

 nent as in forestry, in which compound interest calculation is un- 

 avoidable, in which much of the product is unsaleable and becomes 

 saleable only in time. The time sacrifice is a value or investment 

 which the bookkeeper cannot take care of directly. All the way 

 through there is an attempt to subordinate finance calculation to 

 bookkeeping instead of the reverse. 



Regarding the chapters on forest taxation in the two volumes a 



