The conservation thus suggested does not mean non-use of ripe timber, but does mean protecting it from useless waste and destruction, and replacing it by reforestation when it is used. CONDITIONS OF LIFE THE REAL ISSUE INVOLVED Lack of space forbids recounting many other ways in which the forest question touches the average 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 sixtieth of that sum, or $2,750,000. _If given any chance to do so, the area deforested in only ten years would actually earn the people of our five western forest states $27,500,000 a year._