62 TREE PLANTER'S MANUAL. 



Sec. 17. Establishes special liabilities for damage by fires in case of 

 railroads under construction. 



FIRE INSURANCE AND STOCK LAWS. 



Sec. 18. Provides for the incorporation of forest fire insurance com- 

 panies. It states where cattle are allowed to roam, provisions to stop this 

 practice should be enacted. 



FURTHER DUTIES OF FOREST COMMISSIONERS. 



Sec. 19. Defines minor duties of forest commissioners, namely, to co- 

 operate with superintendents of schools and other educational institutions 

 in awakening an interest in behalf of forestry and rational forest use. 



Sec. 20. Provides for salary and other expenses of the office of forest 

 commissioner, which should be liberal in proportion to the responsibility of 

 the office. 



Sec. 21. Repeals all acts and parts of acts inconsistent with provisions 

 of this act. 



"woodman, spare that tree!" 



Hear this wail from Michigan: 



"Not very many years ago," said Manager Stevens, of the Cranberry 

 Lumber Company, "if the prediction had been made that lumber would 

 have been shipped into Grand Haven, Muskegon and other east shore Lake 

 Michigan towns within the life-time of the old prophet, the statement would 

 have been received as idle talk. Much wilder would that statement appear 

 as applied to the Saginaws. But already considerable lumber is being 

 shipped to the lower Lake Michigan towns, and what is being done for 

 Muskegon, will shortly be done for Saginaw her yards will be stocked 

 from outside sources." 



If Michigan had done forty years ago what it is not yet too late for Min- 

 nesota to do with profitable results, provided for the restoration of the 

 forests from which matured trees had been cut, she would not now be 

 timberless, and her great lumber interest would not be a grinning skeleton! 

 A proper administration of the forests of Michigan would have given her a 

 perpetual succession of matured forests, and her lumber business would 

 have been without end. Under that system Michigan would not have 

 made so much lumber in any one year as now stands on her records, but in 

 a hundred years she would have produced infinitely more. She might have 

 had a good square meal of lumber every day of her life, but she elected to 

 have a feast for a few years and a famine to all eternity! That state now 

 sees the error of her ways when it is everlastingly too late; will not Min- 

 nesota see hers while salvation is yet possible? 



The remaining pine lands of the state are now in or are rapidly passing 

 into the hands of one syndicate of inordinately rich men, made rich by our 

 vast natural wealth of forest that they were permitted to appropriate and 

 devastate in gratification of their insatiate greed. This "Weyerhauser 

 Syndicate," as it is called, now owns an absolutely controlling interest in all 

 the available pine timber in the state, and with its holdings in Wisconsin 



