BRITISH EMPIRE FORESTRY CONFERENCE. 43 



timber resources were regarded as illimitable and inexhaustible, 

 has set up authorities to safeguard the forests, by prevention of 

 improper exploitation, by taking all possible means for diminish- 

 ing the fires, often deliberately started in former days, which 

 have caused such incredible damage in the forest lands of the 

 Eastern provinces and of British Columbia, and by training men 

 in the science of forestry. The Government of the United 

 States, though now so fully alive to the need of the conservation 

 of their forests, and who possess a splendidly organised and 

 efficient forest service directed from Washington, waited till 

 1902 before they took any steps to set their house in order or 

 appreciate the great heritage they possessed. The present 

 writer remembers a long conversation he had one afternoon in 

 California in the summer of 1903 with Mr Gifford Pinchot, into 

 whose able hands the organisation of the United States 

 Forestry Department had been placed by the President. He 

 told me that the people of America had, through generations 

 of pioneers, come to regard the trees as their enemies that must 

 be destroyed to allow of the farmer with his plough, his flocks 

 and his herds, to settle on the land. Who knows that had it 

 not been for the heavy timber of Western Oregon and 

 Washington, regarded at the time as utterly worthless, the 

 British representatives on the International Boundary Com- 

 mission of 1846 would not have been more insistent than they 

 were in claiming a line of demarcation some degrees south of 

 the 49° boundary then drawn between Canada and the United 

 States? 



The second Resolution emphasised the fact that the primary 

 importance of " the foundation of a stable forest policy for the 

 Empire and for its component parts must be the collection, co- 

 ordination, and dissemination of facts as to the existing state of 

 the forests and the current and prospective demands on them." 

 A carefully prepared annexure was added with suggested tables 

 designed to arrive at uniform statistics based on surveys to be 

 made by standardised methods in all parts of the Empire. The 

 detailed objects of such a survey are to afford reliable informa- 

 tion on many subjects of which the principal are as to forest 

 area, the proportion of such areas owned by the State, the pro- 

 portion of accessible and merchantable timber lands, annual 

 timber increment, annual timber utilisation, particulars of forest 

 industries, exports and imports of timber, and enumeration of 



