86 TIMBER REQUIREMENTS 



Now, opinions differ widely as to the accessible 

 amounts of timber, accessible from our point of 

 view, remaining in Canada. Quite recently an 

 expert Canadian lumberer, working for a private 

 firm in this country, who knows the Columbian 

 and other forests well, having worked in them, 

 expressed the opinion that, from the British point 

 of view, the accessible material had been mostly 

 cut out. I have stated already what is meant by 

 accessible. It cannot pay us to take timber from 

 a distant country like Canada unless the material 

 is all water-borne. The freights of long railway or 

 road carriage would kill it for our purposes, as we 

 could not afford to pay the price. The timber 

 materials we have been getting from America and 

 Canada in the past have been almost entirely 

 water-borne, if not quite so. In other words, they 

 have been cut in areas where they could be floated 

 out of the forests, and the concensus of opinion 

 seems to indicate that most of this accessible 

 material all over the world has now been cut out, 

 or is rapidly approaching that state. Can we then 

 depend upon obtaining supplies greater in amount 

 to those we received from Canada in 1913 during 

 the next forty to fifty years at a price we can afford 

 to pay ? The other point, America will become 

 a large importer of timber materials in the near 

 future, for her replanting of the immense felled- 

 over tracts, which she has started on a large scale, 

 will take much the same period of time to mature 

 as ours (which we have not, moreover, begun). 

 Can we expect to compete with her successfully in 



