abandoned, much else of decay and desolation wrought, not only 

 because the lumber industry has gone, but because soil fertility, if not 

 quite gone, is so badly impaired that it starves out the farmer. And 

 when you starve out the farmer in a pioneer country you starve out 

 the town and the railroad. You remember about the homesteaders on 

 those 190,598 acres within what is now "our" landed estate starved 

 out and their farms become the property of the state? If that much 

 territory drifted into starvation, you may well ask how much more 

 towns and villages along with the farms have suffered from famine. 

 If you asked, nobody would answer. Nobody could. 



In the face of this lugubrious record, along comes, now, a 

 proposition to restock with forest growth such of these devastated 

 lands as are obviously and concededly not fit for agriculture. It must 

 be evident to all readers that there are available for agriculture 

 millions of acres more than are included in the public domain. That 

 is, indeed, the proposition to restock with forest growth much of 

 this wasted acreage. It is necessary to come quickly to an under- 

 standing of what is meant by "restocking." 

 WHAT IS MEANT. 



In the large, it means a proposal to begin to put back on the 

 bankrupt and near-bankrupt acres the forest industry that once made 

 it enormously wealth producing. And to put it back in a way not to 

 furnish another single harvest as of yore, but as a permanent, estab- 

 lished, self-perpetuating industry. "Putting it back" is another term 

 that must be explained. 



Restoring, replacing for perpetuity, in small or large degree, the 

 forest industry of Michigan, restocking the idle lands with forest 

 growth, -means replanting as a part of the plan. Even more than that 

 it means assisting nature to do the work herself. Forests may fall 

 before the woodsman or go up in smoke, but the beneficent restorative 

 offices of Mother Nature go on forever, if not wilfully allowed to be 

 impeded. 



Nature is doing her best to bring back to" production vast areas of 

 non-productive land in the region under consideration. As has been 

 hinted in the passing remarks about the jack pine taking the white 

 pine's place, she does not do her best work, doesn't replace No. 1 

 growth with No. 1, but with a poorer stock, unless she is assisted. 

 The first help, and perhaps the greatest help, she gets in the North 

 country is from the fire fighters and their help isn't anything that 

 it ought to be. 



Consideration of the fire element in the general problem will not 

 be complete without examining into the fire-fighting needs and per- 

 formances on the 10,000,000 acres of idle lands. 



ARTICLE IV. 



Owners of the Michigan public domain, the citizens of Michigan, 

 well may ask what is being done to control the fires which are burr 

 ing the remnants of the state's forest wealth and gradually reducing to 

 infertile mineral nakedness the soil on which the forests grew. They 

 may well ask the question in its relation to the state's own domain o 

 upwards to a million acres, and they can as legitimately ask it as per- 

 taining to the other domain of more than 9,000,000 acres belonging to 

 private persons. 



For the land and forest question means food and housing for all 

 along with multitudinous other things, such as ties for railroads, now 



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