IT. 
THE PRICE WE PAY. 
OREMOST among the inevitable 
effects of deforestation we must, 
therefore, rank floods and land- 
Te 
1 
slips. It must be clearly under- 
stood that this description of the 
effects of  bushfelling is by no 
means simply theoretical. Unfortun- 
ately, the theory has been _ illus- 
trated in only too literal and prac- 
tical a fashion in all the countries that 
have ever been endowed with great natu- 
ral forests. In America this question has 
already assumed the dimensions of a 
great national problem, and the disas- 
trous results of erosion are dwelt on im- 
pressively in the report recently presented 
te Congress by the National Conserva- 
tion Commission. “One small neglected 
stream,’ we are told, ‘has been found 
by actual measurement to wash enough 
soil from its hills to deposit silt equal 
to one and a-half tons per acre of its 
watershed in a year. The quantity of 
silt deposited every year by all the 
streams in the United States would cover 
a territory nine hundred miles square 
a foot deep. Our rivers have washed 
783 million tons of the best soil of the 
United States from the upland farms 
and carried it into the rivers, where it 
has formed bars, impeded navigation and 
finally lodged in the great harbours. The 
Government has already spent 553 mil- 
lions of dollars for river and harbour 
improvements,” and this outlay has been 
rendered necessary almost entirely 
through the indirect effects of defores- 
tation. The Commission estimates 
that soil erosion reduces farm 
production from 10 to 20 per cent.; 
and that the annual loss to the farms 
alone is 500 million dollars. The direct 
damage from floods has increased from 
45 million dollars in 1900 to 238 million 
dollars in 1907—and all this enormous 
expenditure and loss is attributed by 
this responsible Commission of experts 
to the reckless slaughter of the forests. 
LANDSLIPS AND FLOODS. 
This conclusion is supported by a host 
of other witnesses. Mr. A. W. Page, in 
an article on the “Statesmanship of 
Forestry,” points out that the Colorado 
in flood time carries down 1000 tons of 
mud a minute, simply because all .the 
trees have been cut away on its water- 
shed. ‘Rivers whose headwaters have 
been deforested are ‘beginning to carry 
mud in this way, building up banks and 
bars, changing their courses and ruin- 
ing navigation”; and most of the trouble 
with the Mississippi which is now to 
be deepened and straightened at a colos- 
sal cost, is due to deforestation. In 
two months in 1905, the floods on the 
Catawba River, we are told, did a million 
and a half dollars’ worth of damage. 
When they subsided some farmers found 
sandbanks ten feet deep on their fertile 
acres. Mr. Stewart White, the famous 
noyelist of the North, says that 18 million 
acres of farm land have been lost in the 
Appalachian district in a few years by 
erosion alone. Ten years ago Professor 
Shaler, of Harvard University, estimated 
that 3000 square miles of soil had been 
washed from the slopes of the Southern 
Mountains on account of the destruction 
of the forests. The upper valleys of the 
rivers are becoming subject to violent 
freshets, and the lower yalleys to great 
overflows which have to be controlled by 
costly levees. And the destruction so 
far, adds Mr. Page, “has been only 
enough to give an imaginative man a 
conception of what floods will come from 
those mountains if all their forests are 
