108 Canadian Forestry Journal. 



a home for himself and his family and who looks forward to 

 spending a lifetime of growing prosperity in the home he is 

 creating, is ready to take these precautions, for they are all in 

 his own interest. But the so-called settler who has taken up a 

 little patch of land merely that he may rob the country of the 

 timber that stands upon it, is in a hurry to realize his gains, and 

 expects to abandon the place as soon as he has done so; conse- 

 quently, he has no more regard for the rights and interests of 

 others than has any other pirate. 



It is very satisfactory to be able to state that the fire- 

 ranger system adopted by the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec 

 is greatly reducing the destruction caused by forest fires. As 

 that system is more fully established and covers a wider range 

 of territory its beneficial results become more apparent. Count- 

 less acts of carelessness on the part of settlers, prospectors, 

 sportsmen and others, which, in former days, would have re- 

 sulted in widespread fires, are prevented or their injurious re- 

 sults checked in good time. The constant increase, in recent 

 years, in the value of standing timber, means that the saving due 

 to careful supervision is greater than it would have been in for- 

 mer times when a great portion of the timbered area had little 

 or no value, owing to lack of facilities for bringing the product 

 to market. 



On the other hand, this increase in value means that 

 there is all the greater inducement to the so-called settler to 

 carry on his nefarious schemes. There is a tendency also to 

 systematize this form of robbery, certain parties keeping as 

 their employees or retainers a number of men who make a 

 practice of securing timber lands by this illegitimate means 

 of pretended settlement. The more valuable the standing 

 timber becomes, the greater is the inducement to schemers of 

 all kinds to find means of capturing the timber on the pubHc 

 domain without rendering an equivalent to the public either 

 in money or in service. This means that the law should be 

 made more and more stringent — on the simple principle that 

 the more valuable the thing to be guarded, the more careful 

 should be the watch that is maintained. 



The pubhc would be more alive to the importance of 

 this matter, I believe, were it not for an indefinite opinion — 

 but one strongly held — ^in the minds of many people that our 

 timber resources are "inexhaustible." With the keeping down 

 of fires and the improved methods of taking off the crop, I be- 

 lieve it is possible to go on cutting spruce in our eastern for- 

 ests for an indefinite time. But the same is not true of our 

 pine, the crop upon which our calculations of forest wealth 

 in the past have mainly been based. The pine tree does not 

 grow so large or yield such good timber in the northern country 

 as it does in the region where the most extensive lumbering 



