Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/132

124 cities was needed. They stripped the forests so a country might grow, just as the Prussian needed to grow and would grow quickly at the cost of his own future, even."

Taylor watched her closely and she saw the bewilderment in his face.

"Your father cut millions of feet of this pine; he bought it and paid for it and his energy made it into homes. But it was his fortune that was made, too, and it was his men who left these barrens behind; and their children are living in a country spotted with great acres of waste land, and his grandchildren will face a timber famine. Do you know that in Michigan there are millions of acres which are considered useless for all time? And not only in Michigan, but in all the Lake States; in New England, in the South, in the West.

"There's over a quarter billion acres of land that once grew forest which now lie idle between the two oceans. A lot of it can never be farmed or grazed, but in that lies our national future. Logs, lumber, forest products are the foundation of national life! Ties for railroads, and charcoal to make the iron that goes into equipment; timbers for the mines that yield coal for the locomotives and metals for every use. The shoes you wear were probably tanned with oak bark. Your necktie is silk, probably artificial silk, made from spruce pulp. The cloth in your coat was woven in wooden looms with a dog-wood shuttle; the pencil in your pocket is made from Tennessee juniper, likely, and the note book behind it came from northern spruce and balsam."

She watched a swamp sparrow perch for a moment on the telephone wire near her house.

"Take the telephone: Again, your mine timbers to