Canada’s supply of spruce is of enormous interest to us, for it feeds a great many of our printing presses. In one single year Canada has cut as much as four million cords of pulpwood, and four fifths of this goes to the United States in the form of logs, pulp, and finished paper. We Americans are the greatest readers on earth. We consume about one third of the total world output of news-print paper. Our presses use more than two million tons in a year, or nearly twice as much as Europe, which has five times our population. A generation ago Canada had not a dozen pulp mills, and only ten years ago its product was but one sixth that of the United States. Since then our production has hardly increased, but the Canadian output has so grown that it will soon exceed that of the States. Indeed, the industry now ranks second in the Dominion. I have before me estimates showing that machines already ordered for new mills and additions will add to the Canadian capacity something like four hundred thousand tons a year. Canada now has more than one hundred paper mills, and if all were run full time at full speed, they would turn out nearly two and one half million tons of paper in a year. The world’s largest ground pulp mill is at Three Rivers, in Quebec, the great paper-making centre I have mentioned in another chapter. That province has also the largest single news-print mill, with machines that are turning out a continuous sheet of paper more than nineteen feet wide, at the rate of about eleven miles an hour, or eighty thousand miles a year. Not long ago one hundred tons of paper a day was the largest capacity of any mill. Now this is almost the standard unit in the industry. A four-hundred-ton mill is operating at Abitibi, and plants of five-hundred-ton daily capacity are already planned for. It takes about a cord of wood to make a ton of news-print, or enough, if rolled out like a carpet, to paper the pavement of a city street from curb to curb for a distance of three and one half miles. A year’s output of a hundred-ton mill would make a paper belt six feet wide reaching four times around the waist of old Mother Earth. Take a big Sunday newspaper and spread its sheets out on the floor. You will be surprised at the area they cover. Now if you will keep in mind that it sometimes takes more than a hundred tons of paper to print a single issue you will realize how fast the forests of Canada are being converted into paper sufficient to blanket the earth. It is several centuries since Shakespeare found Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in everything.