for the finished product or the channels through which they may be 

 sold, neither should they determine the character, or the distribution of 

 the raw material the forests themselves. 



This local handicap to state forest policies is important but it is not 

 decisive. Each state individually may, in the formation of its plan, as 

 you yourselves are doing here, recognize the need not only of an under- 

 standing with its neighbors, but also of co-ordination with the larger plan 

 for the forests of the nation as a whole through a powerful federal agency, 

 such as the Forest Service. 



Who Should Grow Forests? Finally arises the question: Who should 

 grow and own forests? Considerably less than two million acres of forest 

 lands is today publicly owned, and some of that is not in timber. Prob- 

 ably more than two million additional acres now in private holding will 

 be required as a permanent source of timber supply to the nation. May 

 private enterprise be counted upon to provide this raw material for the 

 distant future use of American industries? I do not think so. Men who 

 have bought timber and built saw mills are foresters and interested in a 

 business way in the perpetuation of the forests only in the same sense and 

 to the same degree that coal operators are geologists and interested in the 

 perpetuation of the coal supply. The business of the lumber manufacturer 

 is to make boards out of the trees which he already owns, not to make more 

 trees out of which some one else some day may make more boards. 



By fortuitous circumstances he is usually an owner of cut-over land. 

 This land may be the most useful for permanent forestation, but the owner- 

 ship of such land does not put the owner under obligation to engage in a 

 reforestation enterprise unless he elects to do so. He will not, and he 

 should not, in the public interest, choose to reforest his lands unless to do so 

 would be a profitable enterprise. Even effort, misguided though it is, to 

 compel through legislation, reforestation of private logged-off lands, such 

 as has been not infrequently proposed, will not avail against the economic 

 laws which direct everywhere men's industrial activities. Such legislation 

 would secure, throughout the country at large, not a replacement of the 

 forests through private enterprise but instead a wide-spread reversion to 

 the state of the private lands thus designated for reforestation. Legisla- 

 tion making private forestry compulsory, irrespective of its profitableness 

 or its prospect of profit would produce therefore not trees, but substantially 

 the confiscation of the land upon which it was intended that the trees 

 should grow. But a "forest policy" that does not produce forests is not a 

 forest policy. 



Private enterprise is notably not suited to undertakings which do not 

 bear fruit for from fifty to one hundred years and it cannot wisely be 

 counted upon to provide a substantial future supply of standing timber, of 

 which large size and superior quality are essential. In the case of spruce 

 for pulp manufacture it is possible tha>; private enterprise may be relied 

 upon because the period of tree crop rotation is relatively short and size 

 and quality are by no means such important factors as they are in the case 

 of timber for use in lumber manufacture. 



Similarly softwood timber of some species on southern lands frequently 

 reaches merchantable size within forty years. But this is not true of the 



