e citizen. It enters into our prospects
of development, our investment values and our insurance rates. Like
the keystone of an arch, or the link of a chain, forests cannot
be destroyed without the collapse of the entire fabric. Their
preservation is not primarily a property question, but a principle
of public economy, dealing with one of the elements of human existence
and progress. _Failure to treat it as such means harder conditions
of life, a handicap of industry; not only for our children, but
for us as well._

It all sums up to this: On every acre of western forest destroyed
by fire, or that fails to grow where it might grow, _we, the citizens
of the West who are not lumbermen, bear fully eighty per cent of
the direct loss_ and sustain serious further injury to our general
safety and profit.

HOW WE THROW AWAY MILLIONS

Notwithstanding the above facts, we allow $40,000,000 which we and
our families should share to vanish every year, leaving nothing
more enduring than a pall of smoke from Canada to the Mexican line.
The great area thus denuded uselessly, with that which produced
public wealth through lumber manufacture, _together having been
capable of affording a community resource of $165,000,000_, are
abandoned to lie idle and a menace to remaining timber. It is exactly
as though the owner of a 165-acre orchard should destroy forty
acres wantonly and also abandon the rest, unfenced, uncultivated
and uncared for.

The one waste is as unnecessary as the other. Our Pacific coast
forests owe their unparalleled productiveness to a peculiarly fortunate
combination of climate and rapid growing species unknown elsewhere.
Nowhere else is forest reproduction so swift and certain. Nowhere
can it be secured with so little effort and expense. A little
forethought in cutting methods and protection of the cut-over area
from recurring fires, and an early second crop is assured. Saw timber
can be grown in forty to seventy-five years; ties, mine timber and
piles in less.

HOW WE MIGHT MAKE IMMENSE PROFIT INSTEAD.

It is reasonable to suppose that, although the quality may be inferior
to that of the old forest removed now, timber scarcity will make a
second cut in sixty years equally profitable per acre. Therefore,
if the area denuded annually at present were encouraged to reforest
and protected, it should at the end of that period again yield
$165,000,000 to the community. Each year's growth at present would
be worth a s