Canadian Forestry Journal, August, 1917 



1259 



You can burn a candle at both ends, 

 but not for long. You can strip a 

 square mile of timber on the east side 

 by the axe and on the west side by 

 fire, but the axe will have short em- 

 ployment and the capitalist and work- 

 man and the public treasury will go 

 light on profits. Every year we were 

 adding to the export of forest pro- 

 ducts until timber has become one of 

 our great trading staples in foreign 

 markets. Every year, too, we have 

 been exporting probably four to five 

 million dollars worth of the living 

 timber by the route of llame and 

 smoke, from which no credit slip ever 

 returns. To thinking people, the an- 

 omaly recjuired a cure and by painful- 

 ly slow degrees the same conclusion 

 was crystallized into action by the 

 timber-holding governments. British 

 Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, Nova 

 Scotia and New Brunswick and the 

 Dominion Government (controlling 

 all the lands of the prairies and 40- 

 mile strip along the C.P.R. in British 

 Columbia), formulated plans for fire 

 prevention, and in some instances for 

 a mild instalment of scientific forestry 

 practice. Ontario led the w ay with a 

 ranger service of some magnitude; 

 this served well enough in its earlier 

 days and is now undergoing reorgan- 

 ization. So followed the Federal for- 

 estry branch administering the exten- 

 sive forests in the northern parts of 

 the prairie provinces, and later the 

 British Columbia forest branch, and 

 then the rise of the four mutual pro- 

 tective associations of licensees in 

 Quebec giving skilled fire patrol to 

 75,000 square miles of the best 

 Provincial timber resources. As for 

 the Maritime Provinces, well en- 

 dowed with commercial timber. New 

 Brunswick is about to adopt a modern 

 plan of forest guarding, w^hile in Nova 

 Scotia, favored by a smaller fire 

 hazard, the principles of prevention 

 are already applied with good effect. 



The Victory of the Tree 



This gradual ascent to what would 

 seem the most elementary care and 

 foresight in forest management is a 

 clear-cut triumph for the tree. No 

 amount of sentiment, no flood of re- 

 morse — nothing but the prod of good 



business — has put forest conservation 

 even as far as it is. The tree stands 

 forth as an absolute essential of the 

 country's day-to-day existence. It 

 furnishes* the tools of the fishing in- 

 dustry. For every ton of coal taken 

 from a Canadian mine it must supply 

 six feet of timber for props. No rail- 

 way can run a yard without the tree 

 for ties, coaches, buildings, fencing. 

 No fewer than 500,000 track ties must 

 be taken from our forests every year 

 as renewals on the Canadian Pacific 

 road alone. The same line uses 50,- 

 000 telegraph poles a vear and 60,000,- 

 000 feet of lumber. 



The Printed Page 



Consider the newspaper. The tree 

 is the link between editor and reader, 

 between the news of the world and the 

 eyes of the world. Two hundred 

 spruce trees go into one edition of a 

 Montreal newspaper and a New York 

 paper obliterates 15 acres of spruce 

 and balsam forest with a single Sunday 

 edition. Look into agriculture! Of 

 what value is land without a farming 

 plant — a wooden house a wooden 

 barn, fence posts, implements, wagons 

 furniture, fuel? And hydro-electric 

 development! Forests are the guard- 

 ians and regulators of the streams, the 

 deep spongey masses of the "forest 

 floor" acting as nature's reservoir for 

 the excess waters of spring. As every- 

 one knows who has seen a flood or felt 

 the pinch of a drought, a river at 

 e ther extreme is serving an evil and 

 extravagant purpose, and yet an un- 

 ruly river can too often be traced 

 clearly to an unruly forest. Wreck 

 a watershed forest and you wreck the 

 gold mine of water power and irri- 

 gation development. 



The tree gives employment to 110,- 

 000 Canadian men in more than 5,000 

 factories. It distributes more wages, 

 attracts more capital and uses more 

 human labor than any other industry 

 we have with the single exception of 

 agriculture. There are towns in On- 

 tario and Quebec where the company 

 that built the paper mill in the middle 

 of the wilderness also created an en- 

 tire municipal organization, streets, 

 houses, picture theatre, playgrounds, 

 town hall, police station, churches and 



