“This talk of a lumber famine is all bosh,” I was informed with great candour a short time ago. “Look at the great forests of Washington and Oregon! Think of the almost limitless supply of timber in some of the Southern States! Why, the stripping of the Lake States ought not to make any difference at all!” There are probably several million people in this country of ours who are, just at the present moment, of the above opinion. They have never looked into what I might call the “economy of the Lakes.” A few words will show what part the Lakes have played in the building of millions of American homes. At this writing it cost $2.50 to bring a thousand feet of lumber from Duluth to Detroit aboard a ship. It costs $5.50 to bring that same lumber by rail! Conceding that this year’s billion and a half feet of lumber will be transported a distance of seven hundred miles, the cost of Lake transportation for the whole will be about $3,750,000. The cost of transportation by rail of this same lumber would be at least $7,500,000, or as much again! Now what if you, my dear sir, who live in New York, had to have the lumber for your house carried fourteen hundred miles instead of seven, or three thousand miles, from Washington State? To-day your lumber can be brought a thousand miles by water for $3 per thousand feet; by rail it would cost you $7! And this, with competition playing a tremendous part in the game. When lumber is gone from the Lake regions, will our philanthropic railroads carry this material as cheaply as now, when for eight months of the year they face the bitter rivalry of our Great Lakes marine? “When the time comes that there is no more lumber along the Lakes, what will be the result?” I asked Mr. Calbick, the late President of the Lumber Carriers’ Association. He replied: “Lumber will advance in price as never before. No longer will the frame cottage be the sign of the poor man’s home; no longer will the brick mansion be the manifestation of wealth. It will then cost much more to build a dwelling of wood than of brick or stone. The frame house will in time become the sign of aristocracy and means. It will pass beyond the poor man’s pocket-book, and while this poor man may live in a house of brick it will not be his fortune to live in a house of wood. That is what will happen when the lumber industry ceases along the Great Lakes.” [Illustration: Harbour View at Conneaut, Ohio, Showing Docks and Machinery.] Then this great lumberman went on to say: