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 has been but faintly foreshadowed by temporary scarcities of coal.

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 the 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.

It is true that about twenty per cent, of the less valuable timber land in the United States remains in the possession of the people in the National Forests, and that it is being cared for and conserved to supply the needs of the present and to mitigate the suffering of the near future.  But it needs no argument to prove that this comparatively small area will be insufficient to meet the demand which is now exhausting an area four times as great, or to prevent the suffering I have described.  Measures of greater vigor are imperatively required.