American Forest Congress 119 



serious meaning of the annihilation of their forests. 

 Neither are the men who are engaged in the lumber 

 industry unmindful of the seriousness of the situation. 

 Within a few years there has been a marked change 

 among lumber operators in this respect. This has 

 come about largely because of the increased wealth 

 and intelligence of the men who now control a large 

 percentage of the merchantable timber of the country. 

 Lumbermen in the old days struggled for a mere 

 existence ; in these modern times many of them have 

 emerged from the status of the pioneer to that of the 

 well-to-do business man; many are legislators, nearly 

 all are men of affairs in other lines than lumber, and 

 in point of intelligence and broadness of view they 

 rank with any other class of people in the country. It 

 is impossible that such men should not realize the 

 importance and benefit expressed in the term ''for- 

 estry.'' They are in favor of forest reserves, properly 

 administered, in certain portions of the country where 

 such reserves will do the most good. They indorse 

 the wisest and most thorough economy in the manage- 

 ment of their own forest holdings. They would be 

 glad of any plan for economical cutting and marketing 

 that would be an improvement on present methods. 

 Indeed the tentative efforts that have been made in 

 these directions by owners of yellow pine stumpage in 

 the south prove this. These owners have seen how 

 northern pine has been slaughtered to near exhaustion 

 and wish to avoid such a precipitate, headlong rush 

 toward the end. 



The fact that there was in the past season almost 

 unanimous cooperation among yellow pine manufac- 

 turers, and is now among Pacific coast producers, to 

 curtail the mill output to coincide with the actual 

 demand, shows that there has been an awakening to 

 the evil of sacrificing timber by forcing the sawed 



