354 UNITED STATES FOREST POLICY 



of consumption. It will not be exhausted as soon as that, of course, 

 for reforestation will get more attention in the future, and, as the 

 supply disappears and prices rise, the rate of consumption will tend 

 to decrease; nevertheless, the timber supply will certainly decrease 

 very greatly within the next few decades, and the holders of remaining 

 supplies will perhaps occupy a correspondingly stronger position in 

 the market. Probably there will be fewer operators, at least in the 

 regions of good remaining virgin timber. In the past there has been 

 a tendency in some regions for the smaller and financially weaker 

 timber holders to furnish a disproportionate amount of the annual 

 cut, and, if this tendency should persist, the smaller holders would 

 tend to be eliminated from the field, leaving a larger proportion of 

 the supply in strong hands, capable of taking advantage of a favor- 

 able situation. It may be, too, that there will be a tendency in the 

 more heavily forested regions for large mills to displace smaller mills, 

 because of superior economies. Some indications of such a tendency 

 have appeared in recent years. 



It would be easy to exaggerate these dangers, however. In the first 

 place, as to timber ownership, the government is cutting much less 

 than the annual growth in the national forests, and thus will have 

 a larger proportion of the total standing timber in the future, al- 

 though it will be many years before the government timber will be a 

 very important factor in most markets. Regarding the size of mills, 

 it may be said that there will always be a field for the small mill, in 

 some regions a wider field than now. As the more valuable and acces- 

 sible timber is cut, lumbermen will necessarily resort to inferior 

 stands, either second-growth timber on cut-over lands, or inferior 

 virgin timber, and, on such lands, small mills will prove most 

 economical. 



INSTABILITY OF THE LUMBER MARKET 



Whatever may be our guess as to probable future conditions in the 

 lumber industry, lumbermen rightly claim that during the past decade 

 consumers, or at least retailers, have generally had no reason to 

 complain ; that they have often got lumber below actual cost of pro- 

 duction ; that lumbermen, as manufacturers of lumber, have generally 

 made very low profits, or sometimes no profits at all ; that the situation 



