He would be a queer farmer who spent his 
twelve months in hard labor and then faced such a 
piece of book-keeping as this: 
Planted in wheat.187 acres. 
Harvested.17 acres. 
Set fire to and destroyed... . 170 acres. 
Such a man would certainly meet with little 
respect and would pile up a pretty small bank ac¬ 
count. But we are not one bit better, as you have 
seen, in the way we handle our forests. 
In the last century we allowed to burn down 
one half of the whole forested area of Canada. In 
1915, 1914, 1913, and as far back as you please, our 
loss equalled many millions of dollars a year. 
Killing the Forest Children. 
Most of these fires not only killed all or part of 
the splendid mature timber that was ready for cut¬ 
ting but wiped out the tender young trees, the 
“forest children” which in a few years would have 
reproduced their elders and have kept the family 
going. Fire ends all that. If allowed to run 
through repeatedly it will burn off the soil itself 
and leave what was once a valuable and beautiful 
woodland just a ghastly and empty moor. 
To say that Canada has plenty of timber both 
to cut and to burn is to say something that no forest 
engineer or lumberman will believe. We have only 
one quarter of the standing timber of the United 
States. Instead of our ‘far north’ being ‘filled with 
inexhaustible forests’ it is filled largely with the 
wrecks of burned forests and comparatively little 
growing timber fit for the market. We have to-day 
only enough growing timber to meet our needs. Al¬ 
ready we have paid a severe price for what we have 
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