12 IMPRESSIONS OF FRENCH FORESTRY 



forestier," can be gauged only in an appreciation of the administrative 

 skill of the French, of their practical genius for cooperation, and of the 

 intelligence of many rural classes. These factors have extended the 

 technical practice in public forests far beyond their own hmited areas. 

 Public forests and their staff of trained officers are to be found in every 

 section of the country. They set the standards and their results have 

 demonstrated good forestry to every timber owner in France — in his 

 own immediate neighborhood. How to cut and restock timberland has 

 thus become a common knowledge of the people. The local forest 

 officers of the State are recognized leaders and advisers in all forestry 

 matters. Direct forms of cooperation with private land owners have 

 resulted in the special recognition given to associations of forest own- 

 ers and in the opportunity to place private holdings under the techni- 

 cal methods and legal protection of the "regime." The public forests 

 have thus had a marked educational value and have given stimulus and 

 direction to the whole forestry development of France. 



This fact is indeed suggestive to the United States. In our first steps 

 toward forest conservation, public forests. Federal, State, and municipal, 

 should have a dominating part. They should be created in every section 

 and be identified with its local problems of fire hazard, of timber growth, 

 and of provision for future needs. They should develop the technical 

 practice adapted to our varied forest types and make it common knowl- 

 edge by concrete demonstration, the most effective of all educational 

 measures. In democratic America, as in democratic France, a core of 

 pubHc forests will prove the key to progress. 



PRIVATE FORESTRY IN FRANCE 



Its Economic Basis. — Private forests in France obviously are on a 

 footing totally different from that in the United States. Aside from the 

 national conservatism of the French, their love for forests as things of 

 beauty, and the social inheritances which put their forests in high regard, 

 the high price and close utilization of wood afford an economic basis for 

 the successive cropping of timberland. The prevaiUng stumpage values 

 of French timber in 1917 averaged at least five times the prices for corre- 

 sponding species in the United States. The American Army, for ex- 

 ample, paid about $36 per thousand feet on the stump for oak timber of 

 all grades in the Loire River Valley and up to $50 per thousand feet for 

 silver fir and spruce in the Vosges Mountains. A crop of hardwood 

 coppice, grown in 20 years, brought at the same time from $50 to $60 per 

 acre for fuel as it stood in the woods. These were inflated war-time 

 rates, but on a pre-war basis the disparity between timber values in 

 France and the United States is almost equally great. This is due not 

 alone to the shortage of timber in France and the necessity of importing 



