one or two hints to guide his calculations. Matters of legality came 

 into the reckoning. The status of state-owned and private-owned 

 lands, in respect to protection costs, naturally differ. So does the 

 fire line question, for it is one thing for the state to go out for a 

 day's work on its own land, ripping things up, and quite another 

 thing when the ripping is^to be done on private land. 



The state has its self-imposed handicaps. The Public Domain 

 Commission has to get money from the Legislature to carry out a 

 comprehensive, forward-looking scheme; but it is easy to 'perceive, 

 on examination, that existing laws put upon private persons sortie 

 handicaps in the way of restoration of barren acres to wealth 

 production that the state has not set up in its own pathway. , 



One of these is the Timber Tax Law. This matter is important 

 when the effort to get private interests into this great enterprise pf 

 restoring the bankrupt acres to wealth production is in mind. It will 

 be given first consideration in the following articles, which will then 

 point out a plan at this moment running through the minds of many 

 people, whereby, if it desired to do so, the state could take the most 

 threatening and neglected of privately-owned lands into its own hands 

 and incorporate them in the development area it has laid out for its 

 own activities. 



ARTICLE X. 



Restoration to Michigan's 10,000,000 bankrupt and near-bankrupt 

 acres of cut-over pine lands of a permanent forest industry that will 

 make these lands once more productive of wealth, rebuild decaying 

 North Michigan towns and furnish auxiliary support for agricultural 

 industry in a region where markets are scattered wide and labor too 

 often can not find the winter employment with which to eke out the 

 scanty livelihood which pioneer farms in the sand country afford 

 all this is involved as a prospect in the activities reflected in the 

 beginnings that are being made by the Public Domain Commission 

 on the state's reserved forest lands. 



Private owners of large tracts have begun to show interest in the 

 scheme, but they have not gone very far. Nothing is known in 

 Michigan comparable to the organized -activities of one of the big 

 paper-making corporations over in Quebec, on the St. Maurice River. 

 There a combination of pulp mill interests that controls 15,000 square 

 miles of timber land has a nursery for production of white spruce 

 seedlings. Planting is going on, it is claimed, at the rate of more 

 than 1,000,000 trees a year. Michigan's forestry department plants 

 about 3,000,000 each year. The only Michigan corporation heard of 

 as interested in this work on a comparable scale is a mining corpora- 

 tion in the Upper Peninsula which has been lately inquiring for prices 

 on seedling trees in million lots. 



SEEDLINGS AT COSTS. 



"We can furnish 1,000,000 seedlings a year," said A. K. Chittenden, 

 head of the forestry department of the Michigan Agricultural College. 

 "We gave this company a quotation a year ago, but have heard 

 nothing from them since." 



M. A. C, like the state nursery at Higgins Lake, sells seedlings 

 at cost. The college nursery of 29 acres supplies seedlings for sand 



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