AMERICAN FOREST CONGRESS 327 



The present law on this point should be changed. 

 Instead of remaining inflexible, as it now is, positively 

 prohibiting the exportation of timber cut from public 

 lands from one State to another, the law should be 

 so modified as to allow the department in charge of 

 the forest reserves in its discretion to authorize such 

 exportation when the interests of the people would be 

 subserved and the forest reserves benefited or at least 

 not injured thereby. 



It should not be understood that the present legal 

 difficulty is applicable only to the case cited above. In 

 many of the great forest reserves of the Northwest, 

 where there are hundreds of millions of feet of mature 

 timber which is deteriorating in value every day, there 

 is no local demand ; the lumber manufactured in Ore- 

 gon, Washington, and northern Idaho is practically all 

 shipped to markets outside those States. Because of 

 the inhibiting law now on the statute books, the reserve 

 timber cannot be utilized. It must remain neither 

 useful nor ornamental, and finally die and rot where 

 it grew; while the people of the prairie States of the 

 Middle West appeal in vain for that which they so 

 much need, that which they might have but for this 

 absurd provision of a law enacted long ago to meet 

 conditions that no longer exist. The incongruity of 

 things is manifest. 



This Congress is deliberating here for the purpose 

 of encouraging and making practicable an American 

 forestry system, a system national in its scope; while 

 the law referred to renders impossible the application 

 of some of the most fundamental principles of true 

 forestry by circumscribing vast areas of available ma- 

 ture timber by the impassable barrier of a State 

 boundary line. 



The economical use cannot subserve the miner's 



