22 BULLETIN 638, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



timber. Forest regions have been well developed, provided with 

 excellent transportation facilities, and made prosperous for a few 

 years, only to be stripped of their timber and left desolate, poverty- 

 stricken, and depopulated. Speculation and fraudulent land deal- 

 ing have been practiced extensively. Permanent homes and normal 

 family life have been the exception rather than the rule, and the 

 standard of citizenship has been lowered. 



For all these results the economic system adopted by the country, 

 rather than the individual timber owner or operator, is of course 

 primarily responsible. The individual was not only allowed, but 

 actually encouraged, to follow whatever course would best advance 

 his own interests ; and if in doing so he brought about certain social 

 and economic effects that were detrimental to the welfare of the com- 

 munity as a whole, the public has only itself to blame for the result. 



The private owner very naturally did not feel that it was incum- 

 bent upon him to provide for the needs of future generations, nor did 

 the adoption of such measures as would place the forest on a per- 

 manent producing basis appeal to him as an attractive investment. 

 As a matter of fact, probably the great majority of private owners, 

 and indeed of the general public, hardly thought of such matters at 

 all, or if they did, it was generally with the easy feeling that the 

 future would take care of itself. How it has done so in a number of 

 important respects has been pointed out in the preceding pages. 



It has often been argued that these results, regrettable as they are, 

 could not have been avoided, because the country could have been 

 developed at a satisfactory rate only by the individualistic " let- 

 alone" system that was actually adopted. This statement is open 

 to considerable question ; but even if it is true, that is no reason why 

 the system should still be continued. Economic conditions have 

 changed completely within the last century, and, more important 

 still, the general public now has an entirely different attitude toward 

 problems that affect the community welfare. The tendency of the 

 times is clearly to emphasize the social rather than the purely in- 

 dividualistic point of view. A system that may have been suited to 

 the needs of the country a century or even a few decades ago may be 

 distinctly unsuited to them now. This is very evidently the case so 

 far as the " let-alone " system of handling our forest lands is con- 

 cerned. From a community standpoint that system obviously has 

 broken down. The problem now is to replace it by one that so far as 

 possible will retain the good and eliminate the evil of the old system. 

 Fundamentally this involves merely substituting the practice of 

 forestry for timber " mining," but this in turn involves a number of 

 different steps that deserve some further consideration. 



