“People are beginning to see, and each year they will see more plainly, how absolutely idiotic our State and National governments have been in not compelling forest preservation. For all the centuries to come Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota should be made to supply the nation with timber. In these three Lake States there are millions of acres of ideal forest land which is good for nothing else. Yet for at least half a century must these millions of acres now remain worthless. Nothing has been left upon them. They are “barrens” in the true sense of the word, and before forests are regrown upon them fifty or a hundred years hence, the greatest timber famine the world has ever seen will have been upon us for generations.” Hardly could the significance of the passing of the lumber industry along our Inland Seas be appreciated without taking a brief glance into the past, to see what it has already done for the nation. There is now practically no white pine left in the State of Michigan--once the home of the greatest pine regions in the whole world. Michigan’s tribute to the nation has been enormous. For twenty years she was the leading lumber-producing State of the Union. As nearly as can be estimated, her forests have yielded 160,000,000,000 feet of pine, more than one hundred times the total amount of lumber that will be transported on the Lakes this year. These are figures which pass comprehension until they are translated into more familiar terms. This enormous production would build a board walk five feet wide, two inches thick, and three million miles long--a walk that would reach one hundred and twenty times around the earth at the equator; or it would make a plank way one mile wide and two inches thick that would stretch across the continent from New York to San Francisco! In other words, Michigan’s total contribution of pine would build ten million six-room dwellings capable of housing over half the present population of the United States. As a consequence of this absolute spoliation of the forest lands, a large part of Michigan is now practically worthless. First, the lands were bought by lumbering companies; the timber was stripped--then came the tax-collector! But why pay taxes on worthless barrens, with only stumps and brush and desert sand to claim? So people forgot they owned them, and as a result one seventh of the State of Michigan is to-day on the delinquent tax list. Minnesota is going the way of Michigan. In 1906, there was cut in the Duluth district a total of 828,000,000 feet of white pine; but each year this production will become smaller, until in the not distant future there will be nothing for the lumber ships of the Lakes to carry. What this will mean to the home-builders of the nation can be shown in a few words. Previous to 1860, the Chicago man could buy 1000 feet of the best white pine for $14. To-day it costs him $80! What will it cost ten years hence? [Illustration: A Steam Shovel at Work.