essential elements of industrial and manufacturing 

 production, broke down. The more thoughtful 

 people realize that considerable change is highly 

 desirable. 



The sharp rise in food prices which began before 

 the present war indicates the desirability of using 

 for agricultural purposes the areas best suited 

 for cheap food production. Perhaps it would 

 be more correct to say that the desirability was 

 shown for using agriculturally the areas best suited 

 for maximum food production given man-power. 



The South is nearer to the dense population along 

 the upper Atlantic coast than the West, and has 

 cheap water transportation. 



For these and other less important reasons it 

 is to the national interest to divert colonization 

 southward, so far as that can be done without 

 running afoul of population ambition and, per- 

 haps, political antagonism of other sections of the 

 country. 



Forestation vs. Agriculture. 



It has been urged that forest lands be, so 

 far as possible, continued in timber. There is 

 much to be said in favor of this view. Personally, 

 I am convinced that the agricultural output of 

 the country is not so much a matter of available 

 agricultural land as it is of agricultural labor; that 

 if all the available agricultural labor in the country 

 were concentrated on one-half of the areas now 

 cultivated, a greater amount of food would be pro- 

 duced, and with better social conditions at a less 

 unit cost; that an increase of cultivated area is— 

 with available agricultural labor— not only un- 

 necessary, but really undesirable; that the forest 

 areas of the United States should, on the other 

 hand, be increased; and that from an abstract 

 point of view the best uses of the cut-over lands 

 of the South would be reforestation. 



As a matter of fact, however, the practical 

 working of that sort of thing would be perma- 

 nently to keep vast areas of the South with a very 

 small population. This seems to me to be pen- 

 alizing the South because of the transient condition 

 in which it happens to be at a time when a totally 

 new segregation of lands for various purposes is 

 suggested. The discrimination against the South 

 which would result from changing the forest policies 

 just at this time impresses me more and more with 



