Note 272 — Chapter III · (continued 3)

Let us take the supply of timber for railroad ties. According to Clavé (p. 248), France has 9,000 kilomètres of railway in operation, 7,000 in construction, half of which is built with a double track. Adding turnouts and extra tracks at stations, the number of ties required for a single track is stated at 1,200 to the kilomètre, or, as Clavé computes, for the entire network of France, 58,000,000. As the schoolboys say, "this sum does not prove;" for 16,000 + 8,000 for the double track halfway = 24,000, and 24,000 × 1,200 = 28,800,000. According to Bigelow (Les États Unis en 1863, p. 439), the United States had in operation or construction on the first of January, 1862, 51,000 miles, or about 81,000 kilomètres of railroad, and the military operations of the present civil war are rapidly extending the system. Allowing the same proportion as in France, the American railroads required 97,200,000 ties in 1862. The consumption of timber in Europe and America during the present generation, occasioned by this demand, has required the sacrifice of many hundred thousand acres of forest, and if we add the quantity employed for telegraph posts, we have an amount of destruction, for entirely new purposes, which is really appalling.

The consumption of wood for lucifer matches is enormous, and I have heard of several instances where tracts of pine forest, hundreds and even thousands of acres in extent, have been purchased and felled, solely to supply timber for this purpose.

The demand for wood for small carvings and for children's toys is incredibly large. Rentzsch states the export of such objects from the town of Sonneberg alone to have amounted, in 1853, to 60,000 centner, or three thousand tons' weight.—Der Wald, p. 68. See Appendix, No. 33.

The importance of so managing the forest that it may continue indefinitely to furnish an adequate supply of material for naval architecture is well illustrated by some remarks of the same author in the valuable little work just cited. He suggests that the prosperity of modern England is due, in no small degree, to the supplies of wood and other material for building and equipping ships, received from the forests of her colonies and of other countries with which she has maintained close commercial relations, and he adds: "Spain, which by her position seemed destined for universal power, and once, in fact, possessed it, has lost her political rank, because during the unwise administration of the successors of Philip II, the empty exchequer could not furnish the means of building new fleets; for the destruction of the forests had raised the price of timber above the resources of the state."—Der Wald, p. 63.

The market price of timber, like that of all other commodities, may be said, in a general way, to be regulated by the laws of demand and supply, but it is also controlled by those seemingly unrelated accidents which so often disappoint the calculations of political economists in other branches of commerce. A curious case of this sort is noticed by Cerini, Dell' Impianto e Conservazione dei Boschi, p. 17: "In the mountains on the Lago Maggiore, in years when maize is cheap, the woodcutters can provide themselves with corn meal enough for a week by three days' labor, and they refuse to work the remaining four. Hence the dealers in wood, not being able to supply the demand, for want of laborers, are obliged to raise the price for the following season, both for timber and for firewood; so that a low price of grain occasions a high price of building lumber and of fuel. The consequence is, that though the poor have supplied themselves cheaply with food, they must pay dear for firewood, and they cannot get work, because the high price of lumber has discouraged repairs and building, the expense of which landed proprietors cannot undertake when their incomes have been reduced by sales of grain at low rates, and hence there is not demand enough for lumber to induce the timber merchants to furnish employment to the woodmen."