plish fundamental changes. It will substitute for an enterprise at present aimed only at the utilization of existing resources one embracing also measures for the production of its own supply. There will be steady and fair returns from lumbering, but spectacular opportunities for the investment of capital will cease to exist. The industry will assume normal proportions based upon the actual production of our forests, and will develop soundly with the increase in yield due to the improvement in conservative methods. A steady and sustained output, which may be estimated closely in advance, will tend to the maintenance of a constant scale of values, and to hamper speculation in logs or lumber. The size of the saw-mill will be regulated by the actual annual production of timber in the forest which supplies it. There will be a gradual elimination of enormous milling plants, and the general substitution of the saw-mill of medium size equipped for permanent use and under the same control as an area of forest land yielding a continued supply of timber equal to the capacity of the mill itself.
The general tendency towards wide distribution of the lumber industry will be an important economic feature of its development under conservative methods. The present movements towards centralization in the bodies of merchantable timber still remaining will cease with their consumption. In turning to second growth as a source of supply, the lumberman will establish himself wherever the productive capacity of cut-over lands under conservative handling offers him a fair return for his labor. The final result will be the development in each locality of a permanent class trained to forest work and a favorable geographical allotment of opportunities for the wage earner.
No man can foretell with certainty the value of timber produced under the application of practical forestry, nor the sustained supply which this country is capable of producing. The urgent necessity for the general adoption of conservative methods in lumbering does not rest upon the solution of these questions, but upon the established fact that the present value and the growing scarcity of timber render it profitable to foster the production of a second crop upon cut-over lands. It is to be remembered, also, that the results of forestry follow certainly but gradually. Its immediate adoption throughout the country would serve to shorten the period of decline which is the price the lumber industry must pay for phenomenal but unsound development, but the trees must have time to grow again. The new policy firmly established, the productive capacity of our forests fully utilized, it is believed— and the statement is amply sustained by the record of other countries with a proportionately smaller wooded area and a proportionately equal consumption of forest products—that neither will the value of timber
