NORTH CAROLINA FORESTRY ASSOCIATION Y 



cooperation between owners and employees is lowering the cost of all kinds 

 of wares. Marketing is also being more closely studied than before in our 

 country, and cooperative marketing is succeeding in many localities. 



All the batteries of science are being turned against waste in manufacture. 

 The millions of dollars made each year in Germany since their skilled and 

 enterprising chemists turned coal tar waste into dyes for the world is a sig- 

 nal example. The woodworks now find utilization for almost every scrap. 

 Pine stumps are changing into turpentine bottles. Corn stalks serve multi- 

 farious purposes, and on every hand there is war waged against loss of by- 

 products. 



In the third case, namely, waste in natural products, the crusade is only 

 fairly beginning. Taking men as the highest natural product, there is the 

 war against the waste from preventable diseases like smallpox, consumption, 

 hookworm, yellow fever, cholera, etc. This war, which is both humanitarian 

 and economic, is enlisting more volunteers each year. Then veterinary 

 science is striving for preventives against sick waste in the lower animals. 

 The apparent success of cholera serum, the assured possibility of the eradi- 

 cation of cattle ticks, the tuberculin tests for cattle — these are evidences of 

 practical activity in directions needed. The entomologists and the biologists 

 are moving mightily to prevent sick waste in trees and crops. In mining 

 natural products strides towards saving ores have been made. In the Kim- 

 berly diamond mines, for example, waste has been reduced to a negligible 

 quantity. However, in the great question we are considering today, forestry, 

 waste still looms prodigiously. 



As all the speakers today want to be heard, not for much speaking, but for 

 brief speaking, I want to present this thought: What can our Association do 

 to prevent forestry waste? 



First, we can try to change the American's attitude towards a tree. This 

 is a hard task, but only hard tasks are entertaining. Of course we all recall 

 the attitude of our early settlers toward the tree and remember the reason 

 for that position. To them the trees were a twofold evil. They, in the first 

 place, furnished a lurking place for their enemies — Indians and wild ani- 

 mals — and in the second place they kept the industrious ploughman from 

 making a crop or even a road. Hence a tree, like an ugly woman or a 

 peevish man, had few friends. The slogan of these settlers was, not "Swat 

 the fly"; it was, "Swat the tree." Then as population increased, lumber of 

 course became valuable and there was new reason for swatting the tree. 

 Unfortunately, therefore, our attitude towards the tree became fixed and 

 we are still swatting alike the giant oak and the pickaninny pine sapling. 



We must needs try to unfix this attitude and create a new slogan, "Save 

 the tree." Save it, first, for its economic value; save it, second, for its 

 salutary influence in conserving rainfall, and preventing erosion; save it, 

 third, for its perennial beauty. We can aid in teaching in our homes, in 

 our schools, in our colleges that our forests are too imperial a resource to be 

 ruthlessly squandered. We can help in raising up wardens to protect them 

 and foresters to reproduce them. 



Second, we can aid in the passage of a national law to prevent the importa- 

 tion of insect-infested and diseased plants. We have the unenviable status of 

 being the only great nation that has no quarantine regulations against the 

 importation of diseased plants. So careless are we in respect to diseased 



