FORESTRY EDITORIAL DIGEST 



437 



STILL STICKS PLUCKILY TO ITS FIGHT" 



"A timber famine is near. There are no 

 substitutes for wood pulp and wooden ties 

 and many other essentials of the industry. 

 Nature cannot build a commercial forest in 

 a million years unaided by law, against 

 axes and fires, as they devastate now. 

 Minnesota's most rapidly growing lumber 

 forest cannot attain commercial maturity 

 within fifty years in any event. Southern 

 pine's exhaustion in many areas is only a 

 decade and a half away, and the west coast 

 will not last half a century. Germany and 

 Massachusetts proved reforesting large 

 tracts the surest of highly profitable long- 

 term investments. Western States must 

 get busy." 



The advice to the western States is sound 

 and should be followed. 



Indianapolis Star: A good many trees 

 have been planted here and there over the 

 country by way of memorializing American 

 soldiers who gave up their lives in the war. 

 Mostly they are for individuals a single 

 tree set in a place somehow associated in 

 his lifetime with the one who is gone. A 

 number of groves or parks and stretches of 

 roadway are planned to be planted in 

 groups or in rows in honor of the fallen 

 ones of certain communities. They call 

 them "memory trees," which is a good 

 name. 



Of the single trees an illustration is one 

 planted by pupils of the Force School in 

 Washington, which was attended by 

 Quentin Roosevelt when he was a young 

 boy. He was the only former pupil to 

 lose his life in the world war. A commit- 

 tee of twelve formed by appointment of a 

 member from each class, will have care 

 of the tree; as each member graduates 

 from his class he appoints a member from 

 the incoming class to take his place. Thus 

 there will always be a committee at the 

 school to look after this tree. 



The trees planted at the Technical High 

 School in Indianapolis were in honor of 

 former pupils in the service and not for the 

 dead. Women's clubs, highway associa- 

 tions, State forestry associations, and the 

 American Forestry Association are taking 

 an active interest in the movement. No 

 more beautiful way of paying tribute to the 

 boys who went to war could be devised 

 than the planting of trees, and it is an un- 

 dertaking to be encouraged. Memory trees, 

 singly or in groups, or along "roads of re- 

 membrance" will be known for what they 

 are quite as well as a carved monument 

 and may be far more beautiful. But no 

 memorial of the kind should be established 

 unless arrangements for its future care are 

 also made. We want no neglected memory 

 trees. 



Grand Rapids News: The American 

 Forestry Association is heart and soul with 

 the Massachusetts Forestry Association, as 

 it is in sympathy with every move to con- 

 serve and to build up our forests. A 

 national forest policy is imperative. The 

 States should work in conjunction with the 

 federal government, which already has 

 completed several great undertakings cal- 

 culated to increase the tree acreage of the 

 country. 



THE WOODPILE 



By Henry L. Stoddard, in N. Y. 

 Evening Mail. 



After all is said and done, the 

 newsprint situation goes straight 

 back to the woodpile. 



That fixes the limit of supply. 

 Newspapers have been used to bas- 

 ing their paper contracts on their 

 needs; even in the crisis of the past 

 four months it has not been possible 

 to bring publishers to realize that 

 the size of the woodpile is now and 

 will be hereafter the determining fac- 

 tor in paper supply. 



And the woodpile is fast disappear- 

 ing. No longer is it just a step from 

 the mill door; to comes over the rails 

 now practically to every mill, and the 

 haul grows constantly longer and 

 dearer. 



Newspaper publishers are not the 

 only persons in the world who stand 

 a lot of Tmnishment before they aban- 

 don a habit; that is what thp" - 

 doing so long as thev regard the 

 situation from their office viewpoint. 



In ten years' time we have driven 

 into Canada two-thirds of an indus- 

 try that was in 1910 wholly our own! 



We have wasted our resources like 

 a spendthrift son; it is not a famine 

 we face it is an exhausted source of 

 su*"dy. 



The big thing to do, of course the 

 essential thing to do. sooner nr latpr 

 is to unite on a policy operative AT 

 ONCE to reduce consumption, and 

 to unite also on a programme that 

 will restore our forest lands to t>ro- 

 ductivitv. There is enough land to 

 grow all the timber needed for the 

 nation's requirements: the trouble is 

 that the timber is not there. Let us 

 nut it there; let us make the news- 

 print industry an American industry 

 once more. 



At this time, when lumber prices have 

 soared to almost unheard-of altitudes, it 

 ought not to be difficult to arouse the inter- 

 est of every citizen in forestry. 



Macon, Georgia, News: Of all the monu- 

 ments that will be erected to the memory 

 of our heroic dead, none will be more ap- 

 propriate or impressive than the great 

 forests, planted from American seed, that 

 are to lift their heads on the battlefields of 

 France. 



The offer to supply these seeds was made 

 by the American Forestry Association, and 

 M. Jusserand, French Ambassador at 

 Washington, has just expressed to that 

 Association the thanks of the French Min- 

 ister of Agriculture for the gift, with the 

 assurance that the seed of the Douglas fir 

 one of the noblest of our American trees 

 will be sent to the departments of the 

 Aisne, the Oise, the Ardennes and the 

 Somme, for the reforestation of the region 

 devastated by the war. The seeds of the 

 leafy trees, such as oak, ash and poplar, 

 will be sown this spring in the nurseries of 

 the same school as that of Nancy. 



Said Hamlet of Ophelia, in words of the 

 most haunting melody in literature: 



"Lay her i' the earth 

 And from her fair and unpolluted flesh 

 May violets spring." 



So, too, these trees which had their birth 

 on American soil will be literally fertilized 

 by the blood of some of the best and brav- 

 est of our sons who fought and died on 

 the sanguinary fields of France in the 

 mightiest struggle of all time. 



And no memorial that could possibly be 

 devised appeals more strongly to the senti- 

 ment and to the sound judgment of the 

 American people who see in the plan a 

 wise provision to supply stricken France 

 with the forests of which she stands in 

 such need, and at the same time we pro- 

 vide a memorial to the dead, nurtured by 

 their very life-blood, which shall typify 

 the freshness and vigor of the American 

 manhood offered up in sacrifice that the 

 world might be freed from the German 

 menace. 



Who does not remember the lines of 

 Byron on the field of Waterloo? 



"And Ardenne waves above them her green 

 leaves, 

 Dewey with nature's tear drops, as we 

 pass, 

 Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, 

 Over the unreturning brave." 



Through all the years to come these 

 noble forests in France, seeded from 

 American soil, will bear living testimony 

 of American heroism and at the same time 

 will help to repair the devastation of the 

 Huns. 



Keokuk Constitution Democrat: The 

 vital importance of maintaining the lumber 

 supply is shown by one simple fact, brought 

 out by the American Forestry Association, 

 that there are more than fifty thousand 

 wood-using plants in the United States, 

 employing more than a million persons, and 

 having an invested capital of three billions 

 of dollars. 



