384 REPORT OF THE FORESTRY COMMITTEE 



ards, and exempts them specifically from the Sherman law, would not condemn 

 and seek to prosecute forest growers for attempting similar co-operative improve- 

 ment of a business still more necessary to the community. 



In short, the public would prefer to see all forest industry, public and private, 

 on a sound business footing calculated to preserve it and its benefits to the com- 

 munity, and would expect to pay the cost of producing lumber from the tree to 

 the yard plus the same fair profit that the public itself requires from its individual 

 enterprises. And if this is true, the great need today is for teaching the principles 

 of the business from start to finish. Every process, its cost, and its relation to 

 other processes and to the final price of the product, should be common knowl- 

 edge. 



Nothing can be more inconsistent, so long as most of our forests are pri- 

 vately owned, and even the public forests must be manufactured for us privately, 

 than to antagonize the lumberman whose help we must have by continuing such 

 ignorance of his problems that we even treat him as an enemy. On the whole, 

 forest industry probably surpasses any other in smallness of profit. Unusual op- 

 portunity has built some large fortunes, but for every one of these are many cases 

 where the public has profited by failure. Nor is stumpage speculation any ex- 

 ception. Times are changed. Taxes, protection and interest are now compound- 

 ing more rapidly than prices advance. The tendency is toward competitive over- 

 production rather than toward monopolistic holding back of material. Few if 

 any things are sold at so much less than their value as the trees of which lumber 

 are made. 



Whatever may have been in the past, when new supplies were easily avail- 

 able, the lumber producer now sees his industry dpendent on forest preservation 

 and his interest in this is as keen as ours. If he does not practice forestry it is, 

 as Forester Graves says, for one or more of three reasons : First, the risk of fire ; 

 second, burdensome taxation ; third, low price of lumber. This situation will not 

 be relieved by threats of compulsion but only by learning what it costs to furnish 

 forest crops and establishing a business-like policy accordingly. 



When forest economics are as well understood as the economics of fruit or 

 wheat growing, the suspicion which always confronts mystery will no longer 

 manifest itself in prejudice which works to the consumers' disadvantage. The 

 private as well as public lumber producer, as a class, because he is honest and 

 useful as a class, will be accorded the same respect and helpful sympathy as is 

 accorded the farmer or engineer who develops the possibilities of utilizing our 

 country and supplying its people. And he will be quick to respond. 



So we always get back to education, the line in which forestry effort is the 

 weakest. The ingenuity of theatrical, railroad, political and advertising agencies 

 is proverbial. Activities of this kind are now regarded as business necessity. 

 They are needed and legtimate nowhere more than in forest propaganda, which 

 has nothing to conceal but everything to teach. Education is a matter of pub- 

 licity and publicity is a trade. It cannot be practiced intuitively. Foresters and 

 lumbermen must learn this trade. 



