Frank Vrooman, another recognized authority, makes the following startling observations of one particular flood:

The Kansas River floods of 1903 destroyed $20,000,000 worth of property and 100 lives. One of the most fertile valleys on the continent, 120 miles long, was partly destroyed. Here the rich soil was cut away; there it was covered with sand 6 and 8 feet deep over the field. Holes were cut and lakes left behind. Out of 250,000 acres of wonderfully fertile soil, 10,000 were completely destroyed, 10,000 more lost 50 per cent of their value, and the uncertainty left behind depreciated the value of the whole valley.

Emerson Hough, writing in Outing Magazine, says:

The fact is that the forests are intimately associated with the material welfare of practically every industry and every business in the United States, and their preservation should therefore naturally be a matter of concern to every breadwinner in America.

In the first place the forests have a direct and tremendous influence upon agriculture and, as I have already said and as you all know, the farming interests of America affect the entire country from banks to cobbler. The forests are nature's reservoirs. Wherever they have been cut away disastrous floods have followed as an annual visitation. From a maufacturing point of view the trees enter into the commercial health of a great many of our States and touch intimately every industry employing wood. Exhaustion of the hard-wood supply means the loss of these industries to the States in which they are at present located, since it stands to reason that such industries can not exist when the supply of raw material has vanished.

How seriously America would feel the exhaustion of its hard-wood timber is difficult to realize, especially since in times past the supply has been so ample that we have become accustomed to lavish use. Without hard wood for building purposes, for the manufacture of furniture, for railroad ties, for the manufacture of all kinds of vehicles, and for cooperage, not to speak of telephone and other poles or of agricultural implements, we certainly should be in difficulties.

I am inclined to believe that the failure of the hard-wood supply would more seriously affect the industrial condition than the failure of crops, because crop failure at its worst would be an affliction of one or two years, whereas once the wood supply fails there is no restitution within a generation. Under existing conditions of protection we have, it is said, of hard-wood timber lumber fit to be cut only about fifteen years' supply. Apart from its value as a future hard-wood supply station is the additional and extremely important fact that the streams which water the agricultural lands of the Appalachian region take their rise in a great many instances in this range. Last year there was an illustration in a part of this region of what a flood means in a country where the timber has been cleared, and during every spring we are given almost daily evidence of the disaster that falls upon farm lands where the woodlands, which are the natural reservoirs of farm land, have been cleared of their protecting timber.

The most important manufacturing region of the country is New England, and the majority of its manufacturing industries are dependent, to a large or total degree, upon the rivers which come from the White Mountains, in the Appalachian region. The five States of New England in 1900 contained 53,752 manufacturers, with a total capital invested of $1,409,000,000, and a yearly output of product worth $1,690,000,000 and an annual employee pay roll amounting to $380,000,000. Now consider that 75 per cent of this capital is dependent upon an uninterrupted water supply, and remember that the water supply, in turn, is largely dependent on the forests for its natural reservoir.

As an instance of the effect on soil and agriculture resulting from the unchecked erosion following the destruction of the forests, take the White and Appalachian mountains, which are described as great lumps of earth mingled with stones. The rains and snows wear them away, as spray from a garden hose would wear away a lump of potter's clay. Until man destroyed it, the forest was spread over them, breaking the rush of rain, carrying it in funnels down the trunks of trees or letting it drip harmlessly from the boughs. Thickly covering the ground was a warp or woof of dead leaves, twigs, boughs, humus, and a mat of small green things sheltered by the great trees. The very spirit of the woods is one of shade and moisture, mosses, and the slow overflow of

cool springs. This spirit has been changed by the destruction of the forests. The mountains have begun to dissolve and wash down upon the lowlands. The streams are commencing to silt up with mud. The nap of nature's protecting towel was the large trees. These were taken by lumber companies. The pulp mills followed and sheared to the ground; and then came the farmer, digging up the soil on the lower slopes with plow and harrow, so that a few years of bearing rain and rush of freshets of snow water could not fail to take away the very soil itself; and where the farmer fails to go runs the fire, destroying more than man has destroyed, burning up the very humus of the soil, killing the little plants, baring the earth to all the forces of erosion. The inevitable result is a desert.

Professor Shaler, a conservative scientist, who weighed his words, states in 1896 that 3,000 square miles of highlands south of Pennsylvania had been destroyed for human use and its very soil carried down to the lowlands and the sea, and that arable and forestable lands were then being lost at the rate of 100 square miles a year. Every year since then this leprosy of destruction has spread more and more rapidly. In passing to the lowlands the soil covers up the rich bottoms with sterile detritus, and in reaching the sea it has to be rolled along the beds of navigable rivers, destroying their navigability. With no forest to hold back the waters every year the floods grow worse. This world is as large as it ever will be. We can not make it one inch larger, but we can destroy its usefulness by abuse. Civilized people should be ashamed to do this, and yet we who call ourselves civilized are wasting this planet on which we live at the rate of, perhaps, 200.000 square miles annually-land which our children may so bitterly need.

In this connection it is sufficient to merely refer to the floods of the Ohio River valley, which within the past five or six years are estimated to have damaged property in that valley to the extent of 100 million dollars. It is only necessary to mention the great floods of the Mississippi, the Missouri, and countless other streams.

Even the practical lumberman, whose interests are centered so largely in the destruction of the forests without regard for the future, concedes the danger that threatens a forestless land.

Mr. R. A. Long, the lumberman previously quoted, says in one of his addresses:

It is conceded also that forests aid much in the utilization of our rainfall, as the leaves and branches of trees and the accumulation of humus and leaf mold resist the compacting effect of the rain drops, and hence the soil is kept loose, allowing the water to readily percolate. This covering of the loose litter, twigs, etc., absorbs and holds back the precipitation, preventing its disappearing rapidly by surface drainage, goes largely into the ground, and as a subsoil or underground drainage, reappears in the form of springs, which, being gradually fed by percolation from above, themselves feed rivulets or streams of perennial character. The snows of winter melt more gradually in forest-covered areas, giving more time for the water resulting therefrom to soak into the ground and pass off through the springs. The streams fed from such sources have a continuous supply to be used for irrigation or such other purposes as man may require.

On the other hand, when the forest lands have been denuded the rainfall passes rapidly away, and its resulting effect is not long felt or seen excepting by the filling of the channels of the stream by silt, sand, and gravel washed from above, and the result of the waters having spread over the adjacent lowlands, destroying crops, improvements, live stock, and sometimes even the lives of the inhabitants. It is not unusual in some sections for the fertile valley lands to be destroyed by gravel, stones, and débris carried and deposited by the waters.

Water power exerted through electrical energy, and in operation in so many industries, is impossible without constant and uniform water supply, and this can not be had except along streams whose headwaters have an adequate protection of forest covering, otherwise the erosion of the soil soon fills the reservoirs and waters running unobstructed on the surface converge in great torrents, carrying logs and débris of all kinds, surging irrestibly through the river valleys, taking with it dams, gates, power plants, and destroying what it can not carry away.

Originally the rivers and even the rather small water courses of our country were to a greater or less extent navigable. Their channels were deep, their

waters mostly clear and free from sediment and silt. At the present time, owing to the deforestation of the lands along their banks and especially of their headwaters, the breaking up of the sod and the loosening of the soil consequent upon settlement and cultivation of crops, these channels, formerly deep, have been in some instances entirely filled, everywhere rendered more shallow, until water transportation has ceased and river navigation has become almost obsolete on rivers which were once teeming with commerce.

We have it upon the authority of the Holy Writ that a thousand years before Christ the eastern shore of the Mediterranean was the seat of large cities having an extensive maritime commerce. The mountain region bordering east and west, extending for many miles inland, was covered with a dense forest comprising the cedar of Lebanon, the fir, and the sandalwood, covering an area of 3,500 square miles. The inhabitants of Sidon were largely engaged in cutting, hewing, and shipping timbers from the forests of Lebanon, and the seat of Sidon was a great market and its citizens skilled axmen

** *

These forests have all been destroyed, with no renewal thereof, and with their destruction disappeared the fertile soil. The rain-bearing clouds still float above the mountains of Syria, but they pass on over the bare and heated rocks, and the brooks and small streams of Palestine no longer exist, and throughout Syria stone furnishes the only material for building and wood is as precious as silver.

May it not be true that the destruction of Tyre and Sidon was in great part in consequence of the destruction of these forests, which has rendered that country a barren desert, supplying a scanty sustenance to the sparse population-its beauty, its fertility, its usefulness gone? So the physical geographers

assure us.

In “ Sinai and Palestine," by Dean Stanley, an authoritative record, appears the following:

The countless ruins of Palestine, of whatever date they may be, tell us at a glance that we must not judge the resources of the ancient land by its present depressed and desolate state. They show us not only that Syria might support tenfold its present population, and bring forth tenfold its present product, but that it actually did so. And this brings us to the question which eastern travelers so often ask and are asked on their return, "Can these stony hills, these deserted valley, be, indeed, the land of promise, the land flowing with milk and honey?"

The effect and influence of forests on the climate, health, and water conditions of the country is evidenced by the chronicles of the Mosaic, the Roman, and Greek writers, and many of their far-seeing priests prevented the destruction of the forests. The consecration of groves to religious uses and to various mythological rites connected with them is an evidence of the reverence the ancients had for forests. Homer calls the mountain woodlands the "habitations of the gods, in which the mortals never felled the trees, but where they fell from age when their time had come," and in his tree and woodland nymphs originating in springs, he suggests the intimate relation of forests and springs. Aristotle, in his "National Economy," points out that an assured supply of accessible wood material is one of the “ necessary conditions of the existence of a_city.”

Almost all of the countries of antiquity suffered from the destruction of their forests. So it was with Mesopotamia, now one of the most sterile countries in the East and once famed for its fertility. Greece tells a similar story. Sicily, one of the granaries of the Roman Empire, is now entirely deforested and crop failures are common. In modern times parts of Bohemia, Hungary, and Austria, parts of Denmark, parts of France have suffered sorely from the loss of their forests. China has done nothing to preserve its forests, while Japan has preserved 59 per cent of its total area for forests, with results in the two countries that are strikingly dissimilar.

Mr. KNAPPEN. The Chief of the Forest Service of the United States says that while estimates of the duration of our forests are inevitably misleading, the figures are sufficiently reliable. He says:

The lowest estimate reached by the Forest Service of the timber now standing in the United States is 1,400 billion feet, board measure; the highest, 2,000 billion. The present annual consumption is approximately 100,000,000,000 feet, while the annual growth is but a third of the consumption, or from 30,000,000,

000 to 40,000,000,000 feet. If we accept the larger estimate of the standing timber, 2,000 billion feet, and the larger estimate of the annual growth, 40,000,000,000 feet, and apply the present rate of consumption, the result shows a probable duration of our supplies of timber of not more than thirty-three years. The figures cited are, however, sufficiently reliable to make it certain that the United States has already crossed the verge of a timber famine so severe that its blighting effects will be felt in every household in the land. The rise in the price of lumber which marks the opening of the present century is the beginning of a vastly greater and more rapid rise which is to come. We must necessarily begin to suffer from the scarcity of timber long before our supplies are completely exhausted. It is well to remember that there is no foreign source from which we can draw cheap and abundant supplies of timber to meet a demand per capita so large as to be without parallel in the world, and that the suffering which will result from the progressive failure of our timber was but faintly foreshadowed by the recent temporary scarcity of coal.

Mr. Pinchot thus admirably sums up what the destruction of the forests means:

What will happen when the forests fail? In the first place, the business of lumbering will disappear. It is now the fourth greatest industry in the United States. All forms of building industries will suffer with it, and the occupants of houses, offices, and stores must pay the added cost. Mining will become vastly more expensive; and with the rise in the cost of mining there must follow a corresponding rise in the price of coal, iron, and other minerals. The railways, which have as yet failed entirely to develop a satisfactory substitute for the wooden tie (and must, in the opinion of their best engineers, continue to fail), will be profoundly affected and the cost of transportation will suffer a corresponding increase. Water power for lighting, manufacturing, and transportation, and the movement of freight and passengers by inland waterways, will be affected still more directly than the steam railways. The cultivation of the soil, with or without irrigation, will be hampered by the increased cost of agricultural tools, fencing, and the wood needed for other purposes about a farm. Irrigated agriculture will suffer most of all, for the destruction of the forests means the loss of the waters as surely as night follows day. With the rise in the cost of producing food, the cost of food itself will rise. Commerce in general will necessarily be affected by the difficulties of the primary industries upon which it depends. In a word, when the forests fail, the daily life of the average citizen will inevitably feel the pinch on every side. And the forests have already begun to fail, as the direct result of the suicidal policy of forest destruction which the people of the United States have allowed themselves to pursue.

President Roosevelt, in a speech delivered last spring, summed up the part that the forest plays in the life of a nation very well in the following passages:

The great industries of agriculture, transportation, mining, grazing, and, of course, lumbering, are each one of them vitally and immediately dependent upon wood, water, or grass from the forest. The manufacturing industries, whether or not wood enters directly into their finished product, are scarcely, if at all, less dependent upon the forests than those whose connection with it is obvious and direct. Wood is an indispensable part of the material structure upon which civilization rests; and it is to be remembered always that the immense increase of the use of iron and substitutes for wood in many structures, while it has meant a relative decrease in the amount of wood used, has been accompanied by an absolute increase in the amount of wood used. More wood is used than ever before in our history. ***

When wood, dead or alive, is demanded in so many ways, and when this demand will undoubtedly increase, it is a fair question, then, whether the vast demands of the future upon our forests are likely to be met. You are mighty poor Americans if your care for the well-being of this country is limited to hoping that that well-being will last out your own generation. No man here or elsewhere is entitled to call himself a decent citizen if he does not try to do his part toward seeing that our national policies are shaped for the advantage of our children and our children's children. Our country, we have faith to believe, is only at the beginning of its growth. Unless the forests of the United States can be made ready to meet the vast demands which this growth

will inevitably bring, commercial disaster, that means disaster to the whole country, is inevitable.

If the present rate of forest destruction is allowed to continue, with nothing to offset it, a timber famine in the future is inevitable. Fire, wasteful and destructive forms of lumbering, and the legitimate use, taken together, are destroying our forest resources far more rapidly than they are being replaced. It is difficult to imagine what such a timber famine would mean to our resources. And the period of recovery from the injuries which a timber famine would entail would be measured by the slow growth of the trees themselves. Remember that you can prevent such a timber famine occurring by wise action taken in time; but once the famine occurs, there is no possible way of hurrying the growth of the trees necessary to relieve it.

We contend that legislation which will permit us to draw on the forest supplies is one form of "wise action" demanded by the situation that confronts us. But without looking to the future we already find the effects of the decadence of our forests in the remarkable increase in the price of timber or stumpage. Bulletin No. 77, issued by the Agricultural Department, gives some interesting and astounding figures as to the increased value of stumpage in recent years. According to these facts, based on more than 1,500 reports, white pine in the last eight years has increased in value from $3.66 per thousand feet to last eight years has increased in value from $3.66 per 1,000 feet to $8.09; yellow pine, from $1.12 to $3.16; Douglas fir, from 77 cents to $1.44; cedar, from $1.32 to $4.63; hemlock, from $2.56 to $4.51; spruce, from $2.26 to $5.49. These are averages. In some cases whitepine stumpage was found to be worth $20 per thousand feet; in Michigan it ranges from $5 to $18 per thousand feet; in Minnesota, from $5 to $12. Timber lands that were almost worthless a few years ago have rapidly attained great value. Mr. John L. Kall, a southern lumberman, says that already the growing scarcity of long-leaf pine and steadily increasing demand for it have led lumbermen who acquired stumpage at 50 cents per thousand now to quote it in their opinion worth $2.50 to $3.50, and they believe that in twenty years it will have a value of at least $10 per thousand, and he remarks significantly: "This probable rise in the value of stumpage is the obvious reason for the existence of companies which hold large timber tracts but do not operate them." Actually large tracts of southern timber have been sold at $5 per thousand.

The value of this stumpage held by the speculative companies is of course enhanced by the tariff on lumber. The ownership of timber is passing largely into the hands of great corporations or aggregations of individuals and corporations, who perceive that an increase in its value is a mathematical certainty with the supply so reduced as it is already. It is estimated that three interests now control one-third of all the standing timber in the United States. Many of the holders of timber have acquired their property at insignificant figures and have seen them rise in value, if we are to accept the carefully prepared data of the Government, from 100 to 300 per cent in eight years, and with the probability that this rate of increase will continue in the near future. Yet doubtless many owners of such already handsomely remunerative properties will appear before your committee and argue against the repeal of the lumber tariff. Not content with what the limitations of nature and the demands of society are doing for them, they insist on what amounts to a subsidy from the Government and a subsidy for what? A subsidy, a premium, on the destruction of our remaining forests.