Forestry and Taxation 209 



property, real and personal, at a more or less arbi- 

 trary valuation. The defects of this system are 

 pretty well understood. No regard is paid to the 

 question whether the property does or does not 

 produce a revenue, so as to often make it impossi- 

 ble to hold property which for one reason or the 

 other does not furnish an annual income. In other 

 cases, again, the whole revenue is eaten up by the 

 taxes, making it as undesirable to hold such prop- 

 erty as it is to own such as produces no income 

 whatever. The fact that practically the greater 

 portion of personal property is exempt from taxa- 

 tion altogether, because the assessors cannot dis- 

 cover it, makes the injustice of the burden on the 

 real property still more glaring. 



No species of property is hit more hardly by the 

 crudities of the tax laws than timber-lands. This 

 circumstance is brought about by a number of con- 

 ditions, and it exists as well in regard to lands 

 stocked with merchantable timber as to lands cov- 

 ered with young growth. The question of making 

 the forest industries of all kinds bear their just 

 share of public expenditures is, of course, intimately 

 bound up with the whole problem of taxation, and 

 cannot be fully discussed in this book. So much 

 only we will try to present here as is necessary to 

 show how a faulty method of taxation is one of the 

 chief obstacles to the introduction of better sys- 

 tems of forest exploitation, and especially to the 

 restocking of denuded timber areas by silvicultural 

 treatment. 



