greater. Improvements of all kinds, public buildings, churches
and bridges were built in almost every European community long ago,
while in this country these things are being done each year in thousands
of places.

Wages are higher in this country, and more people are able to afford the
luxuries of life, vehicles, musical instruments, and the large variety
of small conveniences to be found in almost every American home but seen
in few homes of the poorer class in Europe.

These are a few of the reasons why we use such a large amount of lumber
each year. They are all conditions that mean a larger, better nation
than we could otherwise have, with a higher standard of living, and
while in some particulars, as we shall show, there should be changes
that would conserve our forests, the great wastes do not lie in the
_use_, but in the _abuse_ of the forests.

Now let us see what use is made of all the wood that is cut every year.
The greatest use of all is for firewood, but this is largely the
decaying or faulty trees from farmers' wood-lots, or the waste product
of a lumber region, so this does not constitute so heavy a drain on the
forests as the fact that 100,000,000 cords a year are used, would
indicate.

Twenty times as much of the salable timber is sawed into lumber as is
used in any other way. Nearly 40,000,000,000 board feet are thus used,
but lumber is used in a variety of ways, while the other cuts are
confined to a single use.

The first and greatest use of lumber is for building purposes, for
houses, barns, sheds, out-buildings, fences, and for window-sashes,
doors and inside finishings of all buildings, even those made of other
materials.

Next comes furniture of all kinds,--chairs, tables, beds, and all other
house, office, and school furniture; musical instruments, pianos, etc.,
vehicles of all kinds,--farm wagons, delivery wagons, carriages and
other pleasure vehicles, including parts of automobile bodies,
agricultural implements, plows, harrows, harvesters, threshing machines
and other farm implements. Though these are built largely of iron, yet
one-fourth of the implement factories report a use of 215,000,000 feet
of lumber a year, so the entire output of these factories calls for a
large amount of wood from our forests.

Car building is the other really great use for lumber. Freight cars,
passenger cars, and trolley cars use each year an increasingly large
proportion of the product of our saw-mill