Except the Pacific Northwest no part of the Union is so rich in timber as the South. Until about ten years ago, enormous areas of timber land were so far from railroads that nobody could think of lumbering them; now that the hills of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas are penetrated with main lines, now that branches are pushed out and that logging trams stretch still farther, few spots lie more than fifteen miles from rails. Before sawmills arrive, men can earn fair day wages at cutting railway ties and hauling them as much as fifteen miles, so that the poor land-owners have one unfailing cash resource. Up to the financial depression of 1907, lumbering of every kind was very prosperous; new mills were under construction and a large amount of labor found employment. In 1908 many concerns were shut down, and planters were rejoiced because Negroes were coming back to them for employment. The check to lumbering is only temporary. The South still furnishes more than one third of the total product of the country; and Louisiana comes next to the state of Washington in the amount of annual cut. But, as a native puts it, "Timber is a'gittin' gone"; and in ten years most of the Southern states will approach the condition of Michigan and Wisconsin in the decline of that industry. Nevertheless, one may still ride or drive for days through splendid pine forests that have hardly seen an ax. In most places when the timber is cut, farming comes in, and that is the cause of the extraordinary prosperity of the "piney woods" belt, through southern Georgia and Alabama; where the farmer of a few years ago was making a scanty living, he is now able to sell his timber, to clear the land, and to begin cotton raising on a profitable scale. The South is conscious of the wastage of its timber resources, for the cut is now advancing far up on the highest slopes of the mountain ranges; hence the Southern members of Congress have joined with New Englanders in supporting a bill for an Appalachian Forest Reserve, which would set apart considerable areas at intervals from Mount Washington in New Hampshire to Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, to be administered by the federal government in about the same fashion as the similar reserves in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Ranges. This movement is greatly strengthened by the manufacturers, who believe that the water powers require a conservation of the upper forests.