Looking into the New Brunswick has now under way the first great 
aaa eet step in building up a permanent policy in respect to 
: its forests. The Forest Survey and Land Classi- 
fication, which now has been under way for about a year and a half, 
had covered by May 15, 1917, more than 550,000 acres, out of a total 
of 7,500,000 acres of Crown lands. Not only will the province get 
knowledge of the location and contents of its forests land, the amount 
and kind of reproduction, and rate of growth, but will be given an 
accurate soil map, whereby future settlement may be directed intel- 
ligently. The project will occupy several more years and is equivalent 
to a provincial stock-taking, a highly important element in any pro- 
gressive and constructive policy. 
With public opinion heartily endorsing the continuance of the 
Forest Survey, the next step, obviously, is to employ the information 
so secured in the best interests of the people of the province. 
Few men acquainted with New Brunswick or Quebec or Ontario 
woods operations will contend that the present rate of cutting can be 
continued indefinitely, unless present cutting methods are materially 
changed. 
What are the faults of these methods? In what way do they hamper 
the natural re-growth of a tract from which logs are being taken? 
In practically all Government regulations covering Crown timber, 
certain provisions have been inserted aiming to guide the cutting so 
that the forest area may be kept permanently productive. One of 
these provisions specified that trees below a certain diameter shall not 
be felled, except a few for skids, or those blocking a road route. For 
example, the New Brunswick regulations stipulate that‘no spruce tree 
shall be cut on licensed lands unless it will provide a log 123} inches 
or over, stump measuremént. Few will assert that this regulation in 
itself is sufficient or that the Provincial Government is able with its 
present machinery to give it more than formal enforcement. And 
yet on the regulating of cutting by a minimum ‘‘diameter’’ provision 
and other safeguards, dictated by long experience, the future security of 
every lumber and pulp mill and the bulk of the employment in the 
province rests. 
If the provincial storehouse of wood materials is to be handled on 
the basis of permanent ‘production, every form of needless waste must 
be eliminated. The cutting of stumps almost breast high cannot be 
condoned in these days of timber scarcity and rising values. The 
jobber who skims off his tract, leaving lodged trees to rot, who abandons 
patches of trees that are slightly inconvenient to reach, who uses good 
spruce logs for his roads and skidways when inferior logs are ready to 
hand, who refuses to utilize as much of the top as he might properly 
do, is not concerned in anything more than a hand-to-mouth policy. 
What the permanent interests of New Brunswick may be, can appeal 
to him only by reasonable regulations rigidly enforced by Provincial 
officers. The Province has an interest in its forests extending genera- 
tions ahead and having regard not to one class alone, but the whole 
people. 
