346 UNITED STATES FOREST POLICY 



few decades have shown a general tendency to advance, that tendency 

 need not be regarded as prevailing always and everywhere. Many 

 lumbermen have lost money on standing timber. 



It will be pertinent to point out here that, since the economic law 

 of supply and demand determines market value, efforts at price 

 fixing must be ineffective unless accompanied by some limitation of 

 supply. Even experienced lumbermen have probably sometimes been 

 mistaken as to the effectiveness of some of their efforts to maintain 

 price lists. 



Thus general reasoning indicates that price activities have gen- 

 erally/ had little influence. Much of the direct testimony on the subject 

 points to the same conclusion. In the first place, a study of the trade 

 news in the lumber journals indicates clearly that lumber prices were 

 often largely beyond the control of the associated lumbermen. The 

 following excerpts are a few of many that might be given : 



"Many of the small [yellow pine] mills which derive their logs by 

 purchase from others' lands, and must pay for them as they saw, 

 and are thus bound by contracts, are running and placing their 

 lumber on the market at the best prices they can obtain. It is the 

 product of such mills that is being shipped in transit, is being sold by 

 brokers in the large markets at a variety of prices, and is causing a 

 large part of the prevailing demoralization.'"^^ 



"The committee on values of the Southern Lumber Manufacturers' 

 Association in January and February sought to arrest the tendency 

 to a decline in prices by fixing new bases for the list, but in this case 

 the all-powerful trade law of supply and demand asserted its su- 

 premacy over the law of fiat, and prices remained persistently weak."^* 



"The condition of stocks of white pine is such that it is practically 

 impossible to make a price list which will fit them all ; consequently 

 each man with lumber to sell is putting his own price on it according 

 to how his stock is assorted. "^^ 



"The efforts of wholesalers to maintain list price [of hemlock] 

 early in the spring have practically failed, and the man who wants 



17 Jm. Lumberman, Mar. 21, 1908, 38, 

 ^6 Am. Lumberman, Mar. 26, 1904, 15. 

 i» Am. Lumberman, Minneapolis news, Feb. 22, 1902, 48, 49. 



