154 Forestry Quarterly. 



very little capital has been invested in it, and that the entire re- 

 moval of the duty on this class of trees will be attended with no 

 great loss to anyone. 



The statement in Mr. Hill's letter to the Tariff Committee 

 given on page 6,166 of the record, that he has 200,000,000 ever- 

 green seedlings for forest planting, is evidently a typographical 

 error. These trees for forest planting will not average over three 

 years old, so that if the statement were true, Mr. Hill would be 

 selling about 70,000,000 seedlings per annum, or enough to forest 

 about 45,000 acres. It can be positively stated that no re-foresta- 

 tion is being done on this scale. Probably no concern is planting 

 more than the State of New York in its Adirondack forests, and 

 the total area planted by them in 1907 was about 300 acres. Less 

 than 500 acres were planted in 1907 in the whole State of Con- 

 necticut, and it is doubtful if in the whole United States 10,000 

 acres of evergreen forest seedlings have ever been planted in any 

 one year. Mr. Hill's statement therefore is, as printed, not correct. 



It should further be stated that comparatively few importa- 

 tions of forest seedlings are made by the consumer, most of this 

 business being in the hands of nurserymen who make a specialty 

 of importing the stock. Further than this, it is doubtful whether 

 European stock can be successfully shipped very far from the 

 Atlantic Seaboard, as the trees will not stand a longer journey. 

 It would seem, therefore, that any tariff on evergreen seedlings 

 is a burden on the Eastern consumer and does not affect the 

 Western market of the Western producer to any appreciable ex- 

 tent. 



When we consider the large sums that the National and State 

 Governments are spending on forestry propaganda, and that the 

 land owner must wait some forty years for his crop, it seems 

 both unwise and unnecessary to put any additional burden on the 

 cost of planting forests. It is only the very wealthy who will use 

 planting stock at a cost of $4.65 per thousand, which is the cost 

 of white pine transplants delivered in New York this spring. The 

 elimination of the duty will bring this cost down to $3.25 per 

 thousand, placing the trees within the reach of every farmer. 

 The continuance of the duty will restrict planting to persons of 

 wealth or to large corporations who will raise their own plants. 

 The status of the American grower of seedlings will not be af- 

 fected by the removal of this duty, while forestry will at least 

 be made possible to many millions of land-owners. 



