358 MISC. PUBLICATION 218, U. S. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 
LATER EFFORTS 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE YIELD-TAX IDEA 
The above exemption, rebate, and bounty laws, aiming at the 
encouragement of forests established chiefly by planting rather than 
the perpetuation of those derived from natural seeding, cover the 
activities of the States initiating action in this field in what may be 
called the early regime, i. e., up to and including the year 1910. 
Acts of the same sort initiated subsequently belong chiefly to the more 
modern regime, wherein a different type of law prevailed. They will 
be considered in their proper place therein. 
The efficacy of these laws of the earlier regime came under adverse 
scrutiny shortly after the forestry movement was crystallized by the 
organization of State or Federal forestry departments and the engage- 
ment of the services of technically trained foresters. Thus as early as 
1888 the late B. E. Fernow, at that time the leading technical authority 
in the country and chief of the then Division of Forestry of the United 
States Department of Agriculture, openly opposed such tax exemption 
legislation. In an address (185, pp. 52-57) outlining an adequate legis- 
lative program at a forestry convention held in Michigan preparatory 
to recommending the establishment of a State forestry department 
he said, after discussing other more important features of such a 
program: 
There still remains to be considered the legislation of direct encouragement to 
tree planting. This, in my opinion, is the last to be attempted, the most difficult 
to devise and execute, the most harmful to the morals of a community if not 
properly framed and cuarded * * * JT said to the Pennsylvania Board of 
Agriculture the other day: ‘‘The provision of your recent law [the rebate law of 
1887], which will allow me a release of taxes for three decades of 45 cents, 40 cents, 
and 25 cents per acre at the highest, does not even encourage me to undergo the 
trouble of asking for it, although I have some 4,000 acres which I could bring 
under the provisions of thelaw.” * 
Exemptions and similar devices nevertheless continued for many 
years to be resorted to by numerous States, as has already been shown. 
These efforts at least served as gestures of encouragement while 
promising to be much less expensive, though obviously less effective, 
than the means Dr. Fernow then favored as a substitute, namely, the 
widespread distribution, free or at nominal cost, of forest planting 
stock. 
Meanwhile the idea of employing some form of tax relief as an 
encouragement of forestry would not down and was finding a new 
avenue of expression. In some localities timberland owners were 
complaining of impositions by the local tax authorities, and some 
went so far as to contend for a change of some sort. Such was the 
case in Michigan at about the time the State forestry work was being 
organized. About 1890, according to the late Filibert Roth, John J. 
Hubbell, then chief engineer of the Manistee & Northeastern Railroad, 
a one-time land surveyor and timber cruiser, began to agitate for a 
new form of taxation, one that was destined to claim the serious 
attention of the entire country for upwards of a generation at least 
after his time. While his earliest pronouncements on the subject are 
not now readily available in print, the Michigan Forestry Commission 
ihe p. 27) made reference to Mr. Hubbell and his proposals as 
follows: 
