22 STATUS OF FORESTRY IN THE UKITED STATES. 



long run. This is a great advance. With forestry rightly understood, 

 it is a comparatively simple matter to work out the results which the 

 practice of forestry may be expected to secure. 



It is, of course, both useless and unfair to invite forest owners 

 to practice forestry simply for pleasure. In dealing with pubhc forests 

 the first consideration is the pubhc welfare ; in dealing with private 

 forests the first consideration is the business inducement. Forests 

 in private hands are realty investments made for the interest 

 they will produce. Their owners are chiefly concerned with 

 knowing what will happen to the investment, how its interest-yield- 

 ing power will be affected imder the conservative management 

 which the forester recommends. If forestry is not good business, 

 then good business men, such as most forest owners unquestionably 

 are, are precisely the sort of men not to touch it. 



In the past almost the exclusive inducement to invest in forest 

 property has been the chances it offered for clearing up and closing 

 out at a satisfactory profit — a quick and remunerative turnover of 

 capital. This sort of investment has been, and to a greatly limited 

 extent sMll is, highly profitable. It is distinctive of the lumber indus- 

 try. It will continue to characterize transactions in timber land as 

 long as it pays better to skin the land and move on than it does to 

 develop the land and hold on. It has become a business habit, which 

 fact makes it all the harder to change. In order, however, for for- 

 estry to come into general practice, a change will have to come. 



Speculative deals in forest property, buying in cheap in order to 

 sell out at an advance, can go on only as long as it remains compara- 

 tively easy to get in and out of the market quickly; that is, only as 

 long as first-class stumpage can be readily picked up. Cheap virgin 

 forest is getting scarce, and stumpage prices, which so long have 

 lagged behind lumber prices, are rising sharply. The opportunities 

 for forest speculation in the old style are fewer every day. 



Realizing this situation better than anybody else, lumbermen and 

 others owning and dealing in forest lands are beginning to ask whether 

 it is not time to handle forest properties in a different way — to hold 

 them and put them on a permanent paying basis by utilizing the 

 productive power of the forest, together with the advance in 

 stumpage values; in short, whether forestry will not pay better than 

 exploitation. 



A satisfactory answer to the question ''Will forestry pay?" can 

 not be made offhand The problem is not one of theory, but one of 

 conditions; the considerations involved are not absolute, but relative. 

 The point to decide is not whether forests in general and anywhere 

 can, by intensive forestry, be made to yield net profits indefinitely, 

 but whether private forests in the United States, at present and 



[Cir. 167] 



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