"By preventing the wasting of assets," he will be told. "It s cost- 

 ing you a whole lot more right now, in losses, than it would to prevent 

 those losses. Sooner or later, ev-ery acre of all that idle country is 

 going to be put to profitable work. It will be made to grow something. 

 Maybe farm crops, maybe forage crops, maybe timber crops, but all 

 of them depending on the soil. The better the soil t'he better the crops 

 and the other way around, too. Now fire destroys the organic mat- 

 ter in the soil, and that means the humus and the nitrogen. Nitrogen 

 is already the limiting factor in most of our soils. And a common 

 every-summer fire running over fresh-cut forest or virgin forest, will 

 burn up organic material containing nitrogen that would cost you, on 

 the market, around a hundred dollars and up. Every succeeding fire 

 takes a little more and, finally, just about every bit of it. 



FERTILITY BURNED OUT. 



"That's the biggest reason these lands are idle and why so many 

 millions of acres are worthless for farming. Fertility has been burned 

 out. To prevent that will be worth vastly more than the cost of stop- 

 ping fires. 



"Or you could justify it another way. Figure the cost of replacing 

 the young trees burned up. Take the extra low costs of raising and 

 planting trees on the State Forests and apply that to the number of 

 good young trees that burn and it runs into millions of dollars every 

 year or so. The fires have killed out most of the pines and ot'her 

 good trees, but they keep trying to get back and, with half a chance, 

 a lot of the country would go back into pulp and log timber in just a 

 few years. To prevent fire losses in young timber would justify the 

 cost of stopping fire. 



"Or figure it out on another basis. What is the north country worth 

 for recreation purposes? How much money do people spend in order 

 to get into a cool and pleasant green land where there is good fis'hing 

 and hunting and a fine place to play? 



FIGURE TOURIST BILL. 



"Add up the money spent for railroad fares and automobile traffic 

 and in hotel bills and in building and maintaining summer homes, 

 and the business developed for summer tourist traffic and from hunt- 

 ing and fishing and trapping, and what's the gross? If it were so low 

 as $15,000,000 a year, that would be about a dollar an acre for all the 

 idle land and the good land in the north part of the state. But how 

 much tourist and summer traffic will develop in a country full of 

 black stumps and scraggy brush and smoke, where one never knows 

 when it is safe to take a side road or when his camp may be burned 

 out or how often fire will burn over his favorite hunting and fishing 

 grounds? To stop the fires would be a good investment on this count 

 alone." 



"Well, that sounds all rig'ht," the receiver might say, "but what 

 would it cost to stop the fires?" 



The answer to that would be that 5 cents an acre a year would do it 

 if it were properly spent. If that runs up into a lot more money than 

 has been spent for fire-fighting in the past it is because, while we 

 have had some fire-fighting, we have never had fire protection. 



MIGHT GET OLD ACT. 



If the receiver we have supposed to be appointed for the bankrupt 

 area of Michigan were a long-headed receiver, after checking things 

 over a while, probably he would decide: "It would be worth it, but we 



9 



