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 166 John Minto. guard it against fires. As I have told at the beginning of these papers, I almost began life observing the care with which British woodmen saved every part of a tree. When I arrived in America I could not help noticing the waste of timber to economize labor, even in cutting the stumps of an oak, left to be an obstruction to tillage many years, that in Britain would have paid for cutting and carting away the tree. With some kinds of wood destruction has been so unreflecting that black walnut stumps left in cultivated fields for many years sold for more than the land they stood in would sell for. I lived a while in a neighborhood in Pennsylvania where the men associated themselves together to log off a body of land and float the timber down the Alleghany River for sale at Pittsburg. After getting their logs rafted they loaded the raft with hoop-poles— cooper stock— and sold them at Pitts- burg. They averaged seven cents per day per man. On every little farm the timber and brushwood had been cut and largely burned, to get land to raise food on. The most sterile of New England lands, so won, had by 1776 produced the best crop of men known to modern history ; but the war of the Revolution showed them two outlets for their energies better than to waste their labor to make bread from corn and rye : viz., emigration westward, and fisheries and trade by sea. The breaking with England's trade gave them a third, which serves well yet: manufacturing for the South and West, in which they have used no small amount of the best hardwood timber in the world, and have for fifty years been drawing on the Southern and Western States, and for the past fifteen, have been claiming an interest in the forested lands of the Pacific States. Now the necessity for timber for manufacturing is such as to induce the investment of New England capital in Pacific Coast timber lands, and there is no reason to complain of that if they would transfer themselves or their descendants with their capital, and act in the honesty of good citizenship to at- tain the lands legally, without degrading poor and needy people here through hired cruisers and purchasing agents to