SOME QUESTIONS ANSWERED. 29 



promises and representations to exchange its little home in town for a 160-acre 

 piece of pinery sands. "You are unwise to work here in the city and be a 

 slave all your life; you ought to provide for your growing sons" and similar 

 arguments usually catch the man from the old world to whom a 160-acre piece 

 of land looks like a prince's estate. They move, but unaccjuainted with farm- 

 ing, new to the land, they begin and usually begin poorly. Crops fail,, work 

 in the neighborhood is scarce; each year sees poorer living; women and children 

 of course taking the brunt of the suffering for they stay in their isolated 

 home, while the man works in a camp or at some mill where ample board is 

 provided. A few years later the place is abandoned, a family of disheart- 

 ened, distrustful paupers return to the city or are scattered in the neighbor- 

 hood among less unfortunate people. Now we are informed that these "moss- 

 backs" are poor farmers, that they have the bad habit of neglecting their 

 farms and following lumbering opei-ations and going to the mills and that 

 the land is all right and well suited to agriculture if onlj' the right kind of men 

 would take hold of it. There is some truth here, but also much error. A well- 

 to-do man might possibly improve this land, but he certainly does not care to. 

 But suffice it to say that right here in our state there are several (many?) 

 thousand old abandoned places, the houses still standing, or as is usuallj^ the 

 case, burned up by some shiftless vagabond. 



But while our own experience is as yet not sufficiently gathered, the experi- 

 ence of the old world is ample and the lesson it teaches a most important one. 

 Whether they live as shepherds on the mountains of the Karsh, the Alps or the 

 Pyrenees, as small farmers on the sands of Prussia or France, or whether they 

 eke out a wretched livelihood on the highlands of Scotland and the Ap- 

 pennines they all have the same character, it is the "pine-woods cracker" 

 grown old. The best leave, the wretched stay, and everj^ period of bad sea- 

 son drives them to brigandage and beggary. 



3. That even in extremely fertile districts it is hardly wise or safe for agri- 

 culture to dispense with forestry. The farmer of Indiana or southern Michigan 

 holds on to his wood lot in spite of all the smart calculation and advice which 

 figures out for him that he can better afford to buy coal, oil or gas than raise 

 his timber and tells him to a cent how much larger a per cent he can make on 

 hay crops than wood crops. He knows that the wood crop is the only certain 

 one of all the crops he has and he also knows that it costs a great deal of cash 

 (a thing normally scarce on the farm), to buy coal and also that it is of no 

 small importance in his business that he should have a few pieces of good 

 hickory and oak seasoning in case an axle, a whifPetree, bolster or tongue 

 need replacing. Nor is this all, but the farmer of the Iowa prairie who settles 

 on twenty feet of solid fertility finds it a most excellent thing to supply him- 

 self with a small wood lot and become independent of the coal and timber 

 hawker. 



Considering now the conditions in Michigan, we have: A good agricultural 

 state with good climate and with nearly two and a half millions of people near 

 the great markets of the land, almost surrounded by the greatest inland waters 

 of the world, with numerous streams, abundant water power and amply 

 traversed in all directions by numerous railways. Agriculture far more than 

 supplies the needs of the people and is now and probably always will be the 

 greatest industry of the state. The second greatest, the wood-working in- 

 dustry but a few years ago found an ample supply of raw material and its out- 

 put went to the markets of the Atlantic and to the plains of the west as far as 

 the gulf. This is changed, the lumber industry has largely gone from the 

 state, of the large capital invested in this industry in 1890, only about half 



