Lake State pine; so they went south, where they thought there was enough to last forever—and those forests will go out with our generation.
"In the woods when a saw gang has cut into a tree until it commences to sag and snap they stand back and cry 'Timber!' It is the warning cry of the woods; it means that trees are coming down, that men within range should stand clear. My father used to say that the cry of Timber!' was ringing in the country's ears, that the loggers had given the warning, that the last of our trees were commencing to fall—but we haven't heard! Our ears are shut to the cry, our backs are turned and unless we look sharp we'll be caught!"
She paused a moment and lifted a hand and let it fall.
"We're caught now," she said. "It's too late to grow enough in time to avoid the hurt. There will be a shortage; there is now over great regions, and it will be worse before you and I have lived a normal lifetime, in spite of all that men can do. A few years more of doing nothing and the pinch will hurt, hurt, John Taylor! Roosevelt said it again and again, ten years ago; other men have said it; government departments have said it officially. Think of Michigan, a great timber-growing state with millions of acres that will never grow anything else, paying millions of dollars every year in freight bills on lumber! And your father probably said that there was enough-pine here to last the country forever! We can make good a grain shortage in less than a year; we can overcome a meat shortage in three or four seasons, but you can't hurry timber. It needs fifty to a hundred years to reproduce itself and nothing that men know about can hurry it—and men are doing nothing adequate now, this year, this spring, this morning!"
