Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/188

184 various grades are as yet purely arbitrary, they tend to encourage the holding of the better trees for the higher prices. Eventually these prices must be based on the factors which go to produce these better grades, such as the added length of time, the labor expended in silvicultural operations, etc.

At all conservation meetings the cry is common among lumbermen that prices do not yet warrant the practise of forestry. That this is still true in the remoter regions is indisputable; yet the lumbermen should remember that they have only themselves to blame for the condition, since they have always pushed out into new fields faster than the lumber prices warranted. The public is little concerned whether or not a man can practise forestry profitably in one section of the country, if it is known that he can do so in the more accessible regions. The national production of lumber brings up a very nice question. It is well known among lumbermen that a slight overproduction results in a considerable drop in prices; which is, of course, fatal to the forestry cause. Yet we have the popular demand for cheap lumber and the strenuous opposition on the part of the government to any kind of an agreement among lumbermen to limit the output. In the same way the popular feeling is to-day undoubtedly in favor of no tariff on lumber on the ground that more Canadian lumber will be imported, and that our lumbermen will not be obliged to cut so much. As a matter of fact Germany and other countries, which have paid attention to the growing of timber, have a tariff on lumber to protect their growers from countries like our own, which are wholly exploiters of timber, although at the same time a great amount of lumber is imported by their manufacturers. It should be the duty of some federal commission, possibly the Interstate Trade Commission now under discussion, to try to arrive at a compromise between producers and consumers, whereby the annual output would be sufficiently limited to eliminate waste and maintain prices high enough to warrant the practise of forestry; and, on the other hand, to protect the consumers against monopolistic prices.

Bonded indebtedness for railroad construction has been the bane of many a New England town. In the days when the United States government was subsidizing the railroads of the west, the farm towns of New England were raising every possible dollar to build their own railroads in the forlorn hope that in this way they could meet the competition with the fertile lands which a misguided government was giving away in the west. Voting year after year for unneeded protection against foreign nations, these farm peoples were betrayed by the politicians into a far more disastrous competition with cheap lands in the west, which no established community, with accompanying high values,