The position of the forest in the housekeeping of any nation is unlike that of any other great natural resource, for the forest not only furnishes wood, without which civilization as we know it would be impossible, but serves also to protect or make valuable many of the other things without which we could not get on. Thus the forest cover protects the soil from the effects of wind, and holds it in place. For lack of it hundreds of thousands of square miles have been converted by the winds from moderately fertile, productive land to arid drifting sands. Narrow strips of forest planted as windbreaks make agriculture possible in certain regions by preventing destruction of crops by moisture-stealing dry winds which so afflict the central portions of our country.

Without the forests the great bulk of our mining for coal, metals, and the precious minerals would be either impossible or vastly more expensive than it is at present, because the galleries of mines are propped with wood, and so protected against caving in. So far, no satisfactory substitute for the wooden railroad tie has been devised; and our whole system of land transportation is directly dependent for its existence upon the forest, which supplies more than one hundred and twenty million new railroad ties every year in the United States alone.

The forest regulates and protects the flow of streams. Its effect is to reduce the height of floods and to moderate extremes of low water. The official measurements of the United States Geological Survey have finally settled this long-disputed question. By protecting mountain slopes against excessive soil wash, it protects also the lowlands upon which this wash would otherwise be deposited and the rivers whose channels it would clog. It is well within the truth to say that the utility of any system of rivers for transportation, for irrigation, for waterpower, and for domestic supply depends in great part upon the protection which forests offer to the headwaters of the streams, and that without such protection none of these uses can be expected long to endure.

Of the two basic materials of our civilization, iron and wood, the forest supplies one. The dominant place of the forest in our national economy is well illustrated by the fact that no article whatsoever, whether of use or ornament, whether it be for food, shelter, clothing, convenience, protection, or decoration, can be produced and delivered to the user, as industry is now organized, without the help of the forest in supplying wood. An examination of the history of any article, including the production of the raw material, and its manufacture, transportation, and distribution, will at once make this point clear.

The forest is a national necessity. Without the material, the protection, and the assistance it supplies, no nation can long succeed. Many regions of the old world, such as Palestine, Greece, Northern Africa, and Central India, offer in themselves the most impressive object lessons of the effect upon national prosperity and national character of the neglect of the forest and its consequent destruction.