giving away the public supply would strengthen immeasur- 

 ably their present monopoly of standing timber; and it is as 

 certain as the law of gravity that the monopoly of standing 

 timber, which is now being consolidated, will soon be fol- 

 lowed by monopoly of lumber production. Forced sales of 

 public stumpage now would mean that a few years hence, 

 when the concentration in timber has ripened into extortion, 

 the people would turn in vain to their own timber to protect 

 them for their own timber would be gone. 



The Hard Way the Right Way. 



When the forest service took charge of the national forests 

 one of its greatest problems was how to handle their timber 

 resources for the permanent benefit of the whole people. It 

 would have been quite easy to sell the timber for less than its 

 value in enormous quantities and without proper safeguards 

 against forest destruction. Such a policy, following the line 

 of least resistance, would have pleased many lumbermen and 

 politicians, and would have shown from the start a comfort- 

 able balance of revenue over expenditure. But the service 

 knew that its first care must be clean administration and the 

 perpetuation of the forests. Every timber sale for which it 

 was responsible must be followed by the reproduction of the 

 trees, and the service must make certain that young forests 

 in the place cf old should insure for the future some public 

 supply of timber. No other policy could be adopted with fair- 

 ness to the American people, and the forest service took the 

 hard but the right way. Copyright by the Curtis Publishing Co. 



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