planted area, his figures being based on the costs as they were in 1916: 

 There will 'have to be an annual expenditure of $150,000 for the first 



30 years; for the second 30 years an annual outlay of $217,500. 

 The total investment during the 60 years would be $13,365,000. 

 The receipts at the end of the 60-year period, based on 1916 timber 



values, now vastly increased and bound to increase still more, would 



be $13,458,000. 



INVESTMENT'S RETURN. 



It is not to be assumed from these figures, however, that the forests 

 would not do more than merely gain a relatively small profit for the 

 state in all these years. Revenues would not wait on maturity of a crop. 

 Long before the race between outlay and actual money return is won 

 by the forests, the forests would become in fact self-supporting, and 

 independent of legislative appropriations. 



Therefore, it is not to be understood ^hat "outlay" and "expendi- 

 ture" of $150,000 a year for the first 30 years, and $217,500 during the 

 next 30 years means state appropriations. It means that the forest 

 industry which the state would capitalize out of its pocket would 

 begin to put its money back into the business when? Well, scrutiny 

 of the elaborate figures of the forester seems to show that they would 

 in about 30 years. The date has to be guessed at, for yields and 

 prices have to be guessed at yields easier to guess than prices. Con- 

 sidering that famine in forest products impends in lumber and pulp 

 wood especially it doesn't wrench one's sense of probabilities to drag, 

 the self-supporting date for a properly conducted forest forward by 

 several years. 



INCREASE OF RECEIPTS. 



At the beginning of the second period of rotation, when the first 

 crop would be cut, says the forester, the receipts of that year would 

 be several times the legislative appropriation, and that would continue 

 to be the case, indefinitely. Then the forests would be turning into 

 the state's general fund a net annual revenue muc'h in excess of a- 

 ual outlay. 



And all this, as the forester says and repeats, and wisely, is set 

 forth as a business proposition, pure and simple board feet and cords 

 again, with no allowance for reclamations of land too poor to pay even 

 its taxes, no allowance for protection of wild life and making a desolate 

 country attractive, and no allowance for gain in community values, 

 towns revivified and people furnished with work and business. 



The amateur inquirer, getting a sense of these values, naturally, be- 

 fore he gets a sense of the value of a tree, sometimes thinks the forester 

 is standing in his own light by sticking so close to his business text. 

 Every man tp <his trade, however; and it is clearly up to the man in 

 the street to get, first, the immediate business argument, since it is 

 a matter of investing his money in the project. When he has gotten 

 that, it is an open question whether the returns in ot'her things than 

 money from timber are not business also. Certainly anything that 

 enters into the labor of making a bankrupt empire first self-supporting 

 and then remunerative appears to be a business proposition. 



DUTY OF COMMISSION. 



One plain duty of the Michigan Public Domain Commission is to 

 take out of its shelved reports the 24-page study of State Forester 

 Schaa.f with all the elaborate tables, explaining the business aspect of 



