AMERICAN FORESTRY 



651 



stumpage is put on his cost records at 

 $2 instead of $5, because he is selling 

 the timber to his own mill instead of to 

 somebody else. On this miscalculated 

 cost he makes a price that gives away 

 the manufacture for less than it cost 

 him above the price of the timber. 



Nor is this all ; the lumberman is 

 getting nothing for the risks of engag- 

 ing in one of the most precarious and 

 difficult of operations. In the South, 

 which engages principally negro labor, 

 insurance men tell us that more than 

 ninety per cent of the lumber mills 

 burn out every ten years, and no mat- 

 ter how thoroughly insured the lum- 

 berman may be, he will certainlv lose 

 in a fire. For the ability, the genius 

 who can conduct the lumber business 

 as a permanent concern under the pres- 

 ent conditions has yet to be discovered. 

 The saw-mill as the center or focus of 

 the business, possesses this peculiarity ; 

 when it is placed in a locality, it im- 

 mediately begins to cut a circular swath 

 about it. As more capital is invested 

 in the plant to make it more efficient, it 

 means that the life of the plant is being 

 shortened, as the swath in which it will 

 pay to operate will be cut more quickly, 

 and a move will be necessary the sooner, 

 with all the loss incident to readjust- 

 ment and re-establishment. The ques- 

 tion in such a case is how to charge 

 depreciation, for as the plant has only 

 a running value, every doubling of 

 efficiency of daily output, by a doubling 

 of capital invested, would mean the 

 quadrupling of depreciation. In other 

 words, the fact that our forest policy is 

 based upon a plan of depletion, has 

 made the keynote of the business 

 "cheap, inefficient and temporary." Like 

 the Nomadic Indian, we have spread 

 our wigwam upon the fertile prairie, 

 and when the game was hunted out, 

 we have moved to more fertile fields. 

 This lack of permanence, or even dis- 

 couragement of permanence, has been 

 the bane of the saw-mill business dur- 

 ing recent years. The fact that saw- 

 milling has Irjen based upon the prem- 

 ises of a change of locality each five 

 or ten years has deterred the most val- 

 uable type of conservative business man 

 from entering it as his life work, and 



invited speculators who have exploited 

 the natural resources with little thought 

 beyond the material pleasure of the 

 day. 



We shall always have the speculative 

 element in our midst, but the men who 

 represent it should not be permitted to 

 manage as a private business what is a 

 vast matter of public concern and what 

 will be so difficult to replace when lost. 

 It is not only that when the present 

 crop of trees is cut, it will take approx- 

 imately a century to grow a new mer- 

 chantable stand but that it will take two 

 or three centuries to return to the 

 quality of our present virgin timber. 

 Forests are not merely trees ; the ag- 

 gregation of many trees in one place 

 creates forest conditions, and betters 

 the timber for commercial purposes. 

 These forest conditions have to do 

 with such factors as soil cover, con- 

 stant shade and constant reproduction. 

 Once the sun is permitted to touch the 

 soil and dry it out, we must begin from 

 chaos again. Nor is the denudation of 

 the soil a matter merely of taking off 

 so many trees, as we are informed that 

 the forests are watersheds acting as bal- 

 ance wheels upon the inequalities of 

 climate and that if the tree cover is re- 

 moved, we shall be exposed to the 

 violence of alternate freshet and 

 drought. 



These are the conditions that have 

 brought the issue of conservation to 

 the attention of our people, and nudr 

 it and Socialism the paramount and 

 only really important political issues of 

 the day. The conservation of forests i- 

 but a branch of the large general move- 

 ment for the conservation of everything 

 from child life to coal smoke; it mean- 

 that instead of doing the most obvious 

 thing in a tremendous hurry, we shall, 

 in the future, calmly weigh and plan 

 to what end we are going. The trained 

 forester feels that in an ideal world 

 that nation would be happy whose go\ 

 eminent realized that the great public 

 necessities which span more than one 

 ^vneration in their circle, should be 

 placed beyond thr greed of any OIK- 

 generation, and as the national govern- 

 ment is the most permanent element in 

 our civili/ation, it is most luted to exrr 



