$5.00 per thousand to the man who figured that the decrease 

 in cost of skidding would more than pay for the burning; 

 from the man who thought the whole State Service was a 

 farce to the man who wanted that same Service to take 

 charge of all the brush burning and assess the cost against 

 the owners; from the man who objected to any State inter- 

 ference with his logging methods to the man who was willing 

 to live up to the rules at any cost for the sake of posterity 

 and the good of the State. 



At first this wide difference in opinion seems confusing 

 and discouraging. It looks as though there were no possi- 

 bility of getting down to a system which could be univer- 

 sally applied, and it would appear that such a system is what 

 the timber operators want; something which could enable 

 them to give definite instructions to their foreman, to be car- 

 ried out to the letter without further thought or consideration. 



Such a system would certainly simplify matters, but it is 

 utterly impossible. The operators themselves proved this 

 when they tried to apply the old law which specified exactly 

 what should be done, how it should be done and when. No 

 one knows better than the men who tried to follow those in- 

 structions that anything approaching uniformity is out of 

 the question. At least half the operators in the State would 

 be put out of business if such uniform requirements were 

 strictly enforced. 



Nor are the reasons for this very hard to find. Nowhere 

 in the world is there a forest extending over twenty-eight 

 million acres in which the conditions are anything like uni- 

 form; and in few countries are the conditions more varied 

 than in our north woods. If the forests were all clean stands 

 of pure Norway, running twenty thousand to the acre, there 

 would be but one problem which could be quickly solved and 

 a formula developed for the disposal of all brush; it would 

 be a simple matter. The same could be done if the forests 

 were all white pine or all cedar of a certain density; there 

 would be only the one problem. 



Instead of that we have almost endless variations in the 

 conditions. The cost is figured on the thousand feet of logs 

 and not on the unit of area; hence the cost will vary greatly 



8 



