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to the industries, necessities, and well-being of your people that has ever 

 been presented for their consideration, namely, the question of the tim 

 ber supply and consumption of the country, a matter in which every 

 individual, high and low, rich and poor, of your forty millions of people 

 is interested. Being engaged in lumbering* a business 1 have, followed 

 for close on half a century, mainly with the United States, and witness- 

 ing as I did how rapidly one extensive timber section after another in 

 Western Ontario, where I operated, was stripped of its commercial woods, 

 my attention was necessarily drawn to an investigation of the sources 

 and extent of the supply to meet the ever-increasing consumption of both 

 the United States and Canada. I now proceed to give the result of mv 

 researches in relation thereto, so far as the United States are concerned, 

 as briefly as the subject will admit. 



I find of the twenty-six States comprising the New England, the Mid- 

 dle, the Western, and Northwestern to the Rocky Mountains, only four, 

 namely, Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, are now able to 

 furnish supplies beyond their own requirements, and I will now point 

 out the condition these States are reduced to touching their supply of 

 building-timber, and how long they may be expected To stand the drain 

 on their forests, at the rate of consumption going on, of this indispensable 

 material. The State of Maine, which not long since could boast of most 

 extensive pine forests, is now all hut stripped of that valuable wood, and 

 is besides so far denuded of its once-supposed inexhaustible supply of 

 spruce that the lumberers are forced to the headwaters and tributaries 

 of every river in the State to hunt for supplies, and are stocking their 

 mills in a large measure with logs cut from sapling poles of from six to 

 eight inches in diameter, and this reckless and wasteful slaughtering is 

 carried on to such an extent to supply the neighboring States, and for 

 shipment abroad, that a few years will find the people of that State with- 

 out building timber, either pine or spruce, for their home consumption . 

 The Northern sections of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are the 

 only localities of the whole twenty-six States that are able to furnish sup- 

 plies of white pine beyond the wants of their own respective States, and 

 the demand on them" is so heavy for all sections of the country that it 

 will not be possible for them to respond to it for more than six or seven 

 years longer. Their main streams are all stripped, and the lumberers 

 are now operating at the head waters of their tributaries, where they are 

 forced to bank many of their logs in dry gullies, depending on theVin- 

 ter's snow and spring rains to produce freshets sufficient to float them to 

 the main streams, and which often fail, as will be the case with many of 

 them this season, for want of water to move them from where the loggers 

 have hauled them. A number of railways have also been built to secure 

 the lumber traffic of these timber sections; no less than six are now run- 

 ning through every patch of timber otherwise inaccessible to the loggers 

 on the lower peninsula of Michigan, hitherto the greatest lumber-supply- 

 ing State of the Union, and the mill-owners themselves having, many of 

 them, exhausted their timber within team-hauling distance, are busy at 

 work building railways on their own account to enable them to reach 

 what are now the outskirts of their once supposed inexhaustible timber 

 resources. And here in these timber sections, and in the positions I have 

 pointed out, is to be found the whole white pine supply for the consump- 

 tion of your whole country East of the Pacific slope, aiid, were the whole 

 of that supply brought to one point, it could all be covered with the palm 

 of one's hand on any ordinary map of the United States; and yet, not- 

 withstanding this state of the case, the lumberers keep slaughtering 

 away as if life depended on how soon they could rob the country of its 

 timber wealth and bring about a timber famine, to the utter ruin of the 

 wood industries of the countrv, in which everv member of the com- 



