1947 Fredericton Encaenia
Alumni Oration
Delivered by: Orchard, Chauncey D.
Content
"The Alumni Oration: New Wood - New Forest New Challenge, by Chauncey D. Orchard" University of New Brunswick, Reunion-Encaenia, May 11-16, 1947 (May 1947): 29-39. (UA Case 67a, Box 2)
Seeking a theme that would seem to justify this return from across a continent to impose myself on you for half an hour. I found a keynote in a comment of the eminent late Mr. Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States:
"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged: it is the skin of a living thought and may vary in colour and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."
For the past forty years in Canada, the word "forestry" pre-eminently has been the "skin of a living thought". It has cloaked three revolutionary developments:
"The New Wood"
Primitive man, his world and his development, offer a fascinating field for study and speculation. One may well wonder how he ever managed to survive at all. Too slow to run away from his fleeter enemies, too puny to match their strength, too big to hide under a stone, too small to inspire any fear, he might well have perished in his first immature stages as thousands of other nascent species of animals must have done, and many as fully developed and apparently better equipped we know did.
Anthropologists tell us that one important factor in his survival was the odd, and apparently trivial, ability man developed to oppose his thumb to the rest of his hand, thereby acquiring a firm grip—and the two things he first gripped certainly must have been a stone and a wooden stick.
Almost certainly wood was the first material that prehistoric man adapted to his use as a tool, a weapon, or a convenience. It was his first fuel. It first introduced to mankind the principles of mechanics. We may reasonably suppose that his first use of wood was in the form of a stick, and it is hard to imagine that with a stick in his hand that stick was not almost at once a lever; or that, having discovered the lever and the interesting and important fact that with it he could move weights far beyond the limits of his natural strength, the round stick did not almost at once become a roller. It is equally hard to imagine that the wheel was conceived from any other source than the roller.
Mechanics has added very little to the fundamental lever, roller, and wheel known to prehistoric man through the accident of round wood—accident, because there seems to be no reason why nature should not have developed a square tree trunk which would have halted our development in mechanics in the lever stage for untold centuries. We owe, then, to a few freaks of evolution and to round wood the very survival of man and the inspiration for, and the physical development of, his mechanical genius, but insofar as anything basically new was concerned that genius seems to have suffered a complete eclipse for a long period of centuries. Perhaps we should say, rather, that, having discovered and used the initial fundamental principles handed to him by nature in a round stick did not almost at once become a roller. It is equally hard to imagine to nature's gift for a long period of centuries.
Mankind progressed from wood to stone, to metals, added metal to metal, and discovered the secret of alloys, but wood remained just wood, always increasingly useful, but always just wood.
High Skill
Long before the dawn of history, we had attained a high degree of skill in its use. King "Tut" (1350 B.C.) had beautiful furniture of wood, decorated with ivory and metal work, that would do credit to master-craftsmen of today. His workmen made boards, timbers, and veneers, from which they fashioned their finished products.
Less than a hundred years ago, more than three thousand years after King "Tut's" workmen fashioned their boards, our wood-workers, and wood-users, had boards, timbers, and veneers, and the veneers were held in place by the same glue, the product of boiling horns and hoofs, that King "Tut's" craftsmen used.
Had not one, Alexander Buntin, built the first wood pulp plant in America at Valleyfield, Quebec, in 1867 (first wood pulp used for paper—1860), we could have moved our date of transition ahead another fifty or sixty years to well within the range of postgraduate days of the majority of this assembly.
Now witness the transition in the short space of our own experience to the "sew wood" of 1947.
Boards, timbers and veneers still are important items in our wood world, but we have today some boards and veneers that our Egyptian craftsmen hardly could have imagined. This bit of board has been given the unlovely name of "compreg"—45 laminated sheets of thin veneer adding up to 0.8 inches have been interleaved with a plastic resin and pressed into a stable waterproof, and more or less homogeneous mass of wood and resin, five-eighths the thickness of its component parts and approximately twice their density (S.G. 1.02), three to four times the normal strength of wood (tensile strength 37.000 lbs. to wood 8000/1800,) of the same dimensions and comparing favourably with wrought iron (37,000:-45.000), compressed and impregnated—hence "compreg".
And here is a sheet of "three-ply veneer," each sheet cut 5/1000 of an inch thick, defects cut out, edge glued, and finally assembled into a single sheet 15/1000 of an inch thick, with amazing qualities of flexibility and strength. This, incidentally, is the skin of the famous Spitfire and Mosquito fighter planes.
No Longer Just Wood
These examples could be multiplied a thousand times, but the marvels of the "new wood" range as well into an entirely different field. Wood, no longer, is just wood.
Alexander Buntin turned wood into paper in 1867 at the then amazing rate of two and one-half tons per day. Modern newsprint mills make a minimum of about two hundred tons of paper per day, and six hundred to eight hundred tons per day are made in some of the more than one hundred mills in Canada. Paper is one of the most familiar of wood's disguises.
At least one laboratory has succeeded in hydrogenating wood. The resulting substance is a heavy viscous mixture similar to crude oil, from which can be distilled countless fractions, including alcohols, glycols, glycerine, and phenols for making plastics. Under various treatments developed during very recent years, wood has graduated from the status of a very useful, but not very versatile, material handed to us in the "finished" form by nature, to the unaccustomed role of an airy, fairy, wonder substance that masquerades in any one of a thousand transmutations.
We have been familiar with "wooden" paper for about seventy-five years, and with "wooden" textiles for about twenty-five years. Now, "Imagine that you can drop a few tons of tree tops, branches, sawdust, slabs and other waste into a hopper of a great plant, and that then you can walk to the other end of the plant and turn a spigot marked 'lignogene' and get a high-octane fuel
for your car: another marked 'vitamins' and get a package of concentrated vitamins from wood yeast; another marked 'fridgolene' and get a fine anti-freeze agent; another marked 'aquavit' and get a potable drink: imagine this and you will be guilty of over-simplification and exaggeration, but you will not violate basic fact".
Dr. Fernow wrote: "It may be stated without tear of contradiction that outside of food products no material is so universally used and so indispensable in human economy as wood". A recent review says. "More than any other raw material wood disregards the boundaries separating substances from their functions".
German Intention
We are told that Germany actually planned economic and industrial world domination on the basis of wood as a basic raw material, giving wood the descriptive name of "universalrohstoff". In this scheme the derivatives and uses of wood were listed on the basis of known facts and experience in the following order of importance:
Wood has traveled far during the past twenty-five years, and certainly has not reached the end of its course.
It is axiomatic that man lives only by virtue of his natural resources. We have attained to a high degree of skill in fashioning, fabricating, and adapting nature’s gifts to our use and our peculiar needs. We can transform, but we have yet to create an ounce of food or of raw material. A country’s natural resources are the measure of its potential wealth. Its economic development and intellectual culture will determine the use it makes of that wealth; and the wisdom with which the natural resources are managed, used, and conserved, in turn, will determine in large measure the level of the material, intellectual, and cultural development of the country—a beneficent circle.
Here in Canada we have been abundantly blessed with a wealth of natural resources—rich soils, abundant minerals, fish, game, water power, invigorating climate and widespread forests of the most useful of the tree species of the world. They all contribute their share to our livelihood, and the loss or the serious depletion of any one of these resources would have an immediate effect on our scale of living, nation-wide. The loss or serious depletion of our farm or forest resource would be a major national disaster. Both are possibilities to be seriously considered and forestalled; and, without making any dogmatic assertions, it is not impossible that forests, to us here in Canada, may be the more important of the two, with their widespread bearing on such influences as water, erosion and climate, in addition to their own intrinsic value. Unquestionably, the forests have been the most despoiled and stand in the greater danger of nation-crippling depletion.
Time, circumstance, scientist and laboratory have created for us a "new wood" giving promise of a new level of wealth and culture. If we are to inherit that promise in all its attractive possibilities, we must create for ourselves a "new forest".
"The New Forest"
Pioneer peoples in a new land always have been prodigal in the use of their new-found wealth and opportunities.
Extravagant and improvident use of wood resources had so far depleted the formerly widespread forests of Palestine, Asia Minor, and Greece that by the eleventh century, B.C., wood was at a premium, and timber for important buildings had to be brought from long distances. Solomon, and his father, David, before him, had to send to Hiram, King of Tyre, for timbers from Mount Lebanon, algum, fir and cedar, which were brought "in floats by sea to Joppa", and carried thence overland to Jerusalem. But Alexander found these forests of Lebanon, the last forest reserve of the then civilized world, practically exhausted (333 B.C.). Italy, China, Central Europe, every "civilized" country, followed suit.
History brings before us the accumulated experience of the ages in proper perspective, enabling us to analyse cause and effect. From its lessons we should be able to understand the background of existing problems, and plan their rational solution. Forest history teaches that it has not been until imminent disaster has threatened that people have learned to treat their forests as a crop and manage them as such; and it has been only the few more progressive nations that have had the foresight to heed the warnings and profit by it. The result is that we Canadians have before us examples and for our guidance the whole story from abundant wood supply to depletion, and through depletion to rehabilitation on the one hand, or to complete exhaustion on the other.
An address of this description is a poor medium for imparting detailed statistics, and I have no intention of trying your patience with any such. I can assure you, however, that official reports and statisticians, foresters, and forest services tell us that:
More than one-third of the land area of Canada (1.290.960 square miles, or 37%) is forested, in comparison with less than one-sixth (16%) considered to be of present or potential value for agriculture.
Our average annual depletion, used and lost (3,150 million cubic feet), is just about 1% of our total stand of commercial species (311.201 million cubic feet ).
On the subject of increment, or the annual growth offsetting annual depletion, our authorities start to hedge, usually contenting themselves with pointing out that our forest lands should be capable of producing more than we are using, as undoubtedly they should, and that growth is not more than one half of what they could be made to grow under only reasonably good management, which, again, unquestionably is right. Whether they are producing as much as we are using, and when we are going to have them under reasonably good management, are questions still to be answered.
Pattern Of Pioneer People
In the meantime, for fifty to three hundred years past, depending on the region, we have followed, Canada-wide, the historic pattern of pioneer people.
When the white man first came to Canada he found such an overpowering abundance of mature timber that he in his day and with his limited markets and manufacturing facilities and his preoccupation with the essentials of food and shelter, understandably was quite unable to conceive of any shortage of timber. Yet it is amazing how quickly the warning conditions developed. We are told that local industry suffered from exhaustion of accessible timber and fuel supplies before our people began to move west; but roads pushed farther afield, railways, canals, and streams improved for driving, brought relief from hitherto inaccessible regions. Always there was more timber beyond, and temporary embarrassments were soon forgotten. An approved pattern of "progress" and expansion developed in Ontario and held sway for decades. First, the surveyor was sent ahead of the outposts to establish the boundaries of new townships. Next, the logger was encouraged to remove the best of the timber as rapidly as possible. Finally, came the settler, who, without reference to the quality of the soil, was to turn "stump" land into a Garden of Eden. Unfortunately, forest land is not necessarily, indeed, seldom is, arable land. The settler eked out an existence at subsistence level for some years and then, broken and disillusioned, abandoned the attempt.
Quebec has borrowed Ontario's "1847" pattern for its "1947" settlement program.
The Maritime Provinces do not appear to have made any concentrated effort to colonize non-arable forest lands, but otherwise do not appear to have been able to see farther ahead in their forest problems, or to better insure their perpetuation, than the rest of the nation.
The rugged terrain of the Pacific Coast never did engender any rosy dreams of agricultural pre-eminence, but its vast expanse of forest did foster the equally disastrous and false impression of an "inexhaustible resource".
Only an isolated few have looked very far into the future and sounded any note of warning.
MacDonald's Forecast
Sir John A. MacDonald, looking daily down on the Ottawa River, wrote in June 1871 to the premier of Ontario:
"The sight of the immense masses of timber passing my windows every morning constantly suggests to my mind the absolute necessity there is for looking at the future of this great trade. We are recklessly destroying the timber of Canada and there is scarcely the possibility of replacing it. The quantity of timber reaching Quebec is annually decreasing and the fires in the woods are periodically destroying millions in money. What is to become of the Ottawa region generally, after the timber is cut away, one cannot foresee. It occurs to me that the subject should be looked in the face and some efforts made for the preservation of our timber. The Dominion government having no lands has no direct interest in the subject, but it seems to me that it would be a very good thing for the two governments of Ontario and Quebec to issue a joint commission to examine the whole subject and to report:
Rise of Two Forest Schools
Sir Wilfred Laurier convened a historic forest conference at Ottawa in 1906, which had much to do with the awakening of an interest in Canada's forests and forest problems and the establishing of our first two Canadian Schools of Forestry at Toronto in 1907 and at U.N.B. in 1908.
Some theoretically excellent forest laws have been passed in some provinces but by and large the forests have been left to the not too tender mercies of private enterprise in the woods. We have suffered from an almost complete lack of an accurate knowledge of the extent of the resource, an accurate inventory, and from a lack of reliable data on growth rates. We have suffered from a lack of trained men to gather the essential data, analyse it, and to educate the public. We have suffered from the very abundance of our wood supply that always provided more a little further on while the most valuable and accessible forest lands close to centres of population were wastefully logged, burned, reburned, and permitted to develop into barren waste. Sir John A. MacDonald, looking down on the Ottawa River from his office window in 1871, was watering the "square timber" trade at its peak. To Sir John the timber trade mean: "square timber" of white pine. He accurately assessed the portent of his "annually decreasing" deliveries to the ships at Quebec, and we, too, seventy-five years later, know "there is scarcely the possibility of replacing it". But other frontiers, especially in British Columbia, other methods, and other uses postponed the reckoning which we now approach, and certainly will not be able to sidestep, as sawmills, railways, a Panama Canal, and Douglas fir enabled us to side-step exhaustion of the white pine.
We have taken a hasty glance back over the trend of forest history, but it is not our purpose here tonight to make excuses, or to shoulder blame onto our grandfathers. Rather, we seek to recognize a position and shape some future policy. Our grandfathers had their own problems and they met them in the tradition of English-speaking people in their own way. If by chance they made mistakes and left us somewhat less well provided for than they might that is a poor excuse for us to abandon our surest and most valuable source of wealth, or unwittingly, and dimwittedly, to let it slip through our fingers. The old forest of magnificent white pine is gone; spruce is reduced to fence rail proportions; and the majestic centuries old Douglas fir of the Pacific Coast is on its way out.
Canada never can be completely denuded of forest growth of some value. Our resources in forest lands are so great that nature will grow some timber in spite of the worst we can do. But nature's best in active competition with man's worst will be a poor and poverty-stricken substitute for what we might enjoy.
Liquidation
The simple fact is that so-called "forestry" in Canada to date has consisted of little more than the liquidation, usually wasteful liquidation, of a gift crop handed to us by nature. Logging is not forestry. Forestry is the growing of successive crops of wood in the greatest quantity and the highest quality that your land is capable of producing; and I do not know of any forest on any acre in Canada, with the possible exception of a few acres in Government and University experimental forests, that are being so managed. The history of our forest lands is written plainly in the woods for any who care to read, a history of steady deterioration in quality and quantity of wood produced; and the history is the same Canada-wide. Here in New Brunswick and the east, axe, ox team, and sailing ships of the early days slowed the process down to stretch it out over two hundred years. On the Pacific Coast, our power saws, logging railways, diesel trucks, and modern freighters, merely telescoped the process into a short fifty years. The end results have been much the same—denuded lands, deteriorated stands, and poor prospects for a second crop and established industries and communities.
The old forest, the gift of nature from which Canadians have drawn about twenty-five per cent, of their livelihood, is going, or gone. The "New Forest" will be no gift. It will be grown, cultivated, managed, and protected to maturity by us if we are to have forests worth the name at all.
Therein is the new challenge—a challenge as old as the forest problem, dating in Canada at least from Sir John A. MacDonald's concern for his white pine timbers, but ever new until it is faced and adequately disposed of.
"The New Challenge"
We have said that the forests rank high amongst our natural resources. They are not presently the greatest, but in a country approximating ninety per cent, forest land and so situated as to be admirably adapted to the growing of wood, they can be made the greatest without in any way detracting from the value of the others. The gross gain in forest values is net gain in national wealth. Nothing is detracted from anything else. They now account for a sufficiently great part of our living to be disastrous in their loss—and their progressive loss is more than a mere threat. Their influences impinge on every aspect of our life.
Foresters and conservationists have reiterated so often the forest's complementary functions in such matters as regulation of stream flow, control of floods and erosion, production of fur and game, and aesthetic values, that one feels that these influences, intangible as they are, have lost their impact on the well-informed audience. These values are there, they go with the forest and will be lost when we lose the forest, and, intangible as they are, their worth to the nation probably exceeds the value of all direct forest employment and income.
But forests reach still deeper down into our national and economic life. To choose a single significant example, we need more population in Canada. Vancouver Island (12.408 square miles) is approximately the size of Switzerland (1.944 square miles). Vancouver Island is richer than Switzerland in natural resources, enjoys one of the finest climates in the world, and has unequalled appeal to the tourist. The Island supports a population of 177,000, compared to Switzerland's 4.066,400 (1 to 23). This is a condition that is nothing short of dangerous in the present stare of world affairs and it is common Canada-wide. Vancouver Island's forests, put on a sustained yield managed basis, and supplemented with the processing industries they would support, would insure the future prosperity of its present population, and go far toward solving the labor and employment problem for the additional one or two million souls it should be called upon to support.
All this adds up to a challenge of first magnitude for the younger generation of Canadians. Budding young undergraduate foresters may have failed to find any great spiritual uplift in cruise lines that always run uphill, ring-infested stumps that defy counting, back-packing, mosquitoes, black flies, or in bough beds that never prove to be as soft or as aromatic as the poet would have us believe; but if they are to be foresters worth their salt they will in time find something in today's challenge to fire the imagination, to give incentive for great work, and to compensate in large measure for some of the dollars they need scarcely hope to amass in their chosen profession. On their shoulders, and on the Universities, in this forest-dependent country, will rest, in at least equal measure with agriculture and industry, the responsibility for feeding the Canadian people; and, in greater measure, the responsibility for Canada's cultural level and scale of living.
Infant Profession
We older, early graduates of our first forest schools, newcomers in an infant profession, had little chance to practice forestry. When I went first to British Columbia we still thought there that we had somewhere in the neighborhood of a two-hundred-year supply of virgin timber; and less than twenty years ago in that province I listened to one of our most prominent foresters ridicule the idea of sustained yield management before a meeting of the Canadian Society of Forest Engineers. Under the prevailing public sentiment and laws of the land, Canada-wide, our job, perforce, was to assist in the progressive liquidation of the existing asset. If in spite of that we managed to wedge in enough surveys, research, investigation, and education along rational forestry lines finally to break the ice of public indifference, as in most regions we have with the encouragement and connivance of a certain few farsighted legislators and the press, then we have accomplished about as much as reasonably could have been expected of us. But forest management is a very long-term undertaking and any drawing back, more particularly in the critical stages of early development, is likely to ruin all progress made to date.
It is significant that the press, our legislators, and people generally, have stopped referring to our "inexhaustible resources".
Even though the Dominion Government still fails to protect its own indirect but enormous income from forest resources by assisting the provinces in such matters as forest protection, responsible Ministers of the Crown have admitted the responsibility. In December, 1945, the Minister of Mines and Resources issued a statement which included this comment: "The nation cannot afford to see forests, as a source of raw materials, dissipated. It is believed that the Dominion could properly assist the orderly development of the national forest resources in two directions, first, by expanding activities for which it would be fully responsible, and second, by assisting through provision of funds to raise provincial standards in respect of the conservation, protection and development of the provincial forest resources."
British Columbia, by Royal Commission, has recently (January,1946), completed a second exhaustive study of the forest situation in that province and has within the past few weeks passed some of the most constructive and far-reaching sustained yield measures yet enacted in Canada.
Ontario and Saskatchewan have recently completed similar investigations.
The time is ripe, and the prospects were never brighter, for a concentrated effort on the part of the Canadian people to turn over a new leaf in forest management; to lift the forest resource out of the sink hole of liquidation and put it on the solid foundation of rational management. It will be a long process, stretching over the next hundred years, calling for unremitting vigilance, effort and leadership. Those responsibilities fall now, at a most critical period, on the forest schools and on the men now entering the forest profession.
Number Inadequate
Since the first classes were graduated about 1910 by the newly-established Forest Schools at Toronto and U.N.B, we have trained, as nearly as I have been able to learn, about nine hundred foresters, or an average of about twenty-five per year. During this University year now closing there were about one thousand students in the four forestry schools, and the prospects appear to be that this number will be increased by twenty-five per cent, in 1948. I detect some uneasiness as to whether Canada can absorb any such numbers of trained foresters.
In the light of the problems we have to solve that fear is ridiculous. The number is inadequate.
In the light of the values and profits involved, any such fear is short-sighted and clearly brands a timid and wavering approach to the development of our most valuable asset and business prospect.
Will Need Them
From the immediate, personal, but highly practical, standpoint of whether these men will be able to find a job, my opinion is that we will find employment for all who will be graduated from the present enrolment, and will continue to need foresters in like numbers. We have been deprived of the services of perhaps two hundred young foresters who normally would have been graduated during the war years. There are more than that number of forestry jobs vacant at the present time; and one thousand men in training does not mean one thousand foresters. There is a heavy normal "wastage" during the four or five years intervening between entrance and graduation. There is a
further wastage after graduation that always will be operative no matter how many positions may be vacant, or how urgently the men may be needed in the work for which they have trained. One thousand men in the schools probably means not more than one hundred graduated per year, of whom between fifty and seventy-five may be expected to be employed in forestry work after the lapse of ten years. In view of the fact that men with forestry training are always in demand in the closely allied activities of logging and manufacturing, the promising development in forestry practice which will call for more and more practicing foresters in industrial employ, the need for more men in the various Government Forest Services, and the obvious necessity of raising to professional level many jobs now occupied by "practical" men. I find considerable encouragement for the future of forestry and nothing to arouse fear in an enrolment of one thousand men in the Forest Schools.
Conclusion
We have endeavored this evening, in the course of less than 60 minutes, to make a quick summary of centuries of forest and wood history, and to relate that history to the present situation and future prospects in Canada.
Perhaps we have not made faster progress in applied forestry because we have tried to cover too much ground; because the few have wanted to move too fast and consequently have run into the stone wall of characteristic reluctance on the part of most people to abandon the old, or to adopt the new. Always, too, there has been the difficulty of "getting across" the proper perspective. Marie Antoinette, confronted with the inconceivable idea of the masses needing and crying for bread, is reported to have asked in amazement. "Why don't you give them cake?" Going about our affairs in Victoria at a temperature of 40 degrees above, it really means nothing to us when we read that Snag Creek is suffering at 80 degrees below (Daily Press, Feb. 3). You must have experienced 50 or 60 degrees below zero to imagine what 80 below means. The rich simply cannot appreciate the misery and frustration that goes with poverty, and Canada will find it extremely difficult to appreciate what a scarcity of wood will mean.
It is quite possible that we in Canada have been a little too rich for our own good, and certainly we have no general conception of what forest depletion will do to us as a nation. With our background we cannot conceive of any such thing as a ruinous wood shortage; and that ruinous shortage, if we permit it to come, has been developing, and will develop, so gradually that succeeding generations will have no clear-cut standards for comparison.
Canada has depended, and continues to depend, to such an extent on wood that, without it, and in spite of our other life-saving natural resources, we would be a poverty-stricken nation.
Always A Mainstay
Wood has always been a mainstay of the human race.
Today, the field of usefulness of wood and its value has so widened that we are quite justified in talking of the "New Wood" as if of an entirely new resource.
Canada depends on wood for about twenty-five per cent, of her income. The proportion is so great that its loss would be disastrous.
Deteriorated Forests
New Brunswick's forest resource has badly deteriorated. I need not quote authority. Go look at your woods.
Ontario has thousands of acres of drifting and eroding sands that once supported their most valuable white pine stands.
British Columbia has twenty million acres of denuded forest lands, and if lately applied measures, too recent to judge effects, do not have the desired results, we are adding to these denuded areas every year more acres than an expensive planting program of twenty million trees per year will rehabilitate.
A combination of circumstances have conspired to aggravate a situation already critical and now threatening to become worse.
Improvement and eventual remedy will arise out of a clear recognition of the facts, a will to remedy, and an adequate number of trained foresters for leadership and technical direction. Foresters of the right calibre and in sufficient numbers will hasten the public education and crystalize the will.
Century And A Half
For nearly one hundred and fifty years U.N.B. has been doing the work that the small University is best fitted to accomplish, sending out into the world a steady leaven of educated young men and women, unspoiled by luxury, serious-minded, of high ideals, and admirably adapted and equipped for leadership. After an absence of twenty-seven years, during which I have had some opportunity to observe apparently more favored centres of learning, I have no desire to see U.N.B. a “great institution” in the commonly accepted sense of the term. Already for more than one hundred years U.N.B. has been great in its service in New Brunswick and Canada. I confidently expect it to be greater in that best sense of the word—and in this "new" field of forestry it has an unequalled opportunity to add measurably to its greatness.
Seeking a theme that would seem to justify this return from across a continent to impose myself on you for half an hour. I found a keynote in a comment of the eminent late Mr. Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States:
"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged: it is the skin of a living thought and may vary in colour and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."
For the past forty years in Canada, the word "forestry" pre-eminently has been the "skin of a living thought". It has cloaked three revolutionary developments:
- A complete and world-wide change in the importance of wood in human economy—a new wood.
- A rapidly changing concept of the role of forests and forestry—a new forest.
- An outstanding challenge to the young people and the educational institutions of the country—a new challenge.
"The New Wood"
Primitive man, his world and his development, offer a fascinating field for study and speculation. One may well wonder how he ever managed to survive at all. Too slow to run away from his fleeter enemies, too puny to match their strength, too big to hide under a stone, too small to inspire any fear, he might well have perished in his first immature stages as thousands of other nascent species of animals must have done, and many as fully developed and apparently better equipped we know did.
Anthropologists tell us that one important factor in his survival was the odd, and apparently trivial, ability man developed to oppose his thumb to the rest of his hand, thereby acquiring a firm grip—and the two things he first gripped certainly must have been a stone and a wooden stick.
Almost certainly wood was the first material that prehistoric man adapted to his use as a tool, a weapon, or a convenience. It was his first fuel. It first introduced to mankind the principles of mechanics. We may reasonably suppose that his first use of wood was in the form of a stick, and it is hard to imagine that with a stick in his hand that stick was not almost at once a lever; or that, having discovered the lever and the interesting and important fact that with it he could move weights far beyond the limits of his natural strength, the round stick did not almost at once become a roller. It is equally hard to imagine that the wheel was conceived from any other source than the roller.
Mechanics has added very little to the fundamental lever, roller, and wheel known to prehistoric man through the accident of round wood—accident, because there seems to be no reason why nature should not have developed a square tree trunk which would have halted our development in mechanics in the lever stage for untold centuries. We owe, then, to a few freaks of evolution and to round wood the very survival of man and the inspiration for, and the physical development of, his mechanical genius, but insofar as anything basically new was concerned that genius seems to have suffered a complete eclipse for a long period of centuries. Perhaps we should say, rather, that, having discovered and used the initial fundamental principles handed to him by nature in a round stick did not almost at once become a roller. It is equally hard to imagine to nature's gift for a long period of centuries.
Mankind progressed from wood to stone, to metals, added metal to metal, and discovered the secret of alloys, but wood remained just wood, always increasingly useful, but always just wood.
High Skill
Long before the dawn of history, we had attained a high degree of skill in its use. King "Tut" (1350 B.C.) had beautiful furniture of wood, decorated with ivory and metal work, that would do credit to master-craftsmen of today. His workmen made boards, timbers, and veneers, from which they fashioned their finished products.
Less than a hundred years ago, more than three thousand years after King "Tut's" workmen fashioned their boards, our wood-workers, and wood-users, had boards, timbers, and veneers, and the veneers were held in place by the same glue, the product of boiling horns and hoofs, that King "Tut's" craftsmen used.
Had not one, Alexander Buntin, built the first wood pulp plant in America at Valleyfield, Quebec, in 1867 (first wood pulp used for paper—1860), we could have moved our date of transition ahead another fifty or sixty years to well within the range of postgraduate days of the majority of this assembly.
Now witness the transition in the short space of our own experience to the "sew wood" of 1947.
Boards, timbers and veneers still are important items in our wood world, but we have today some boards and veneers that our Egyptian craftsmen hardly could have imagined. This bit of board has been given the unlovely name of "compreg"—45 laminated sheets of thin veneer adding up to 0.8 inches have been interleaved with a plastic resin and pressed into a stable waterproof, and more or less homogeneous mass of wood and resin, five-eighths the thickness of its component parts and approximately twice their density (S.G. 1.02), three to four times the normal strength of wood (tensile strength 37.000 lbs. to wood 8000/1800,) of the same dimensions and comparing favourably with wrought iron (37,000:-45.000), compressed and impregnated—hence "compreg".
And here is a sheet of "three-ply veneer," each sheet cut 5/1000 of an inch thick, defects cut out, edge glued, and finally assembled into a single sheet 15/1000 of an inch thick, with amazing qualities of flexibility and strength. This, incidentally, is the skin of the famous Spitfire and Mosquito fighter planes.
No Longer Just Wood
These examples could be multiplied a thousand times, but the marvels of the "new wood" range as well into an entirely different field. Wood, no longer, is just wood.
Alexander Buntin turned wood into paper in 1867 at the then amazing rate of two and one-half tons per day. Modern newsprint mills make a minimum of about two hundred tons of paper per day, and six hundred to eight hundred tons per day are made in some of the more than one hundred mills in Canada. Paper is one of the most familiar of wood's disguises.
At least one laboratory has succeeded in hydrogenating wood. The resulting substance is a heavy viscous mixture similar to crude oil, from which can be distilled countless fractions, including alcohols, glycols, glycerine, and phenols for making plastics. Under various treatments developed during very recent years, wood has graduated from the status of a very useful, but not very versatile, material handed to us in the "finished" form by nature, to the unaccustomed role of an airy, fairy, wonder substance that masquerades in any one of a thousand transmutations.
We have been familiar with "wooden" paper for about seventy-five years, and with "wooden" textiles for about twenty-five years. Now, "Imagine that you can drop a few tons of tree tops, branches, sawdust, slabs and other waste into a hopper of a great plant, and that then you can walk to the other end of the plant and turn a spigot marked 'lignogene' and get a high-octane fuel
for your car: another marked 'vitamins' and get a package of concentrated vitamins from wood yeast; another marked 'fridgolene' and get a fine anti-freeze agent; another marked 'aquavit' and get a potable drink: imagine this and you will be guilty of over-simplification and exaggeration, but you will not violate basic fact".
Dr. Fernow wrote: "It may be stated without tear of contradiction that outside of food products no material is so universally used and so indispensable in human economy as wood". A recent review says. "More than any other raw material wood disregards the boundaries separating substances from their functions".
German Intention
We are told that Germany actually planned economic and industrial world domination on the basis of wood as a basic raw material, giving wood the descriptive name of "universalrohstoff". In this scheme the derivatives and uses of wood were listed on the basis of known facts and experience in the following order of importance:
- Solid and liquid fuels.
- Food and fodder.
- Cellulose and textile fibre.
- Structural material
- Basic materials for chemical industry
Wood has traveled far during the past twenty-five years, and certainly has not reached the end of its course.
It is axiomatic that man lives only by virtue of his natural resources. We have attained to a high degree of skill in fashioning, fabricating, and adapting nature’s gifts to our use and our peculiar needs. We can transform, but we have yet to create an ounce of food or of raw material. A country’s natural resources are the measure of its potential wealth. Its economic development and intellectual culture will determine the use it makes of that wealth; and the wisdom with which the natural resources are managed, used, and conserved, in turn, will determine in large measure the level of the material, intellectual, and cultural development of the country—a beneficent circle.
Here in Canada we have been abundantly blessed with a wealth of natural resources—rich soils, abundant minerals, fish, game, water power, invigorating climate and widespread forests of the most useful of the tree species of the world. They all contribute their share to our livelihood, and the loss or the serious depletion of any one of these resources would have an immediate effect on our scale of living, nation-wide. The loss or serious depletion of our farm or forest resource would be a major national disaster. Both are possibilities to be seriously considered and forestalled; and, without making any dogmatic assertions, it is not impossible that forests, to us here in Canada, may be the more important of the two, with their widespread bearing on such influences as water, erosion and climate, in addition to their own intrinsic value. Unquestionably, the forests have been the most despoiled and stand in the greater danger of nation-crippling depletion.
Time, circumstance, scientist and laboratory have created for us a "new wood" giving promise of a new level of wealth and culture. If we are to inherit that promise in all its attractive possibilities, we must create for ourselves a "new forest".
"The New Forest"
Pioneer peoples in a new land always have been prodigal in the use of their new-found wealth and opportunities.
Extravagant and improvident use of wood resources had so far depleted the formerly widespread forests of Palestine, Asia Minor, and Greece that by the eleventh century, B.C., wood was at a premium, and timber for important buildings had to be brought from long distances. Solomon, and his father, David, before him, had to send to Hiram, King of Tyre, for timbers from Mount Lebanon, algum, fir and cedar, which were brought "in floats by sea to Joppa", and carried thence overland to Jerusalem. But Alexander found these forests of Lebanon, the last forest reserve of the then civilized world, practically exhausted (333 B.C.). Italy, China, Central Europe, every "civilized" country, followed suit.
History brings before us the accumulated experience of the ages in proper perspective, enabling us to analyse cause and effect. From its lessons we should be able to understand the background of existing problems, and plan their rational solution. Forest history teaches that it has not been until imminent disaster has threatened that people have learned to treat their forests as a crop and manage them as such; and it has been only the few more progressive nations that have had the foresight to heed the warnings and profit by it. The result is that we Canadians have before us examples and for our guidance the whole story from abundant wood supply to depletion, and through depletion to rehabilitation on the one hand, or to complete exhaustion on the other.
An address of this description is a poor medium for imparting detailed statistics, and I have no intention of trying your patience with any such. I can assure you, however, that official reports and statisticians, foresters, and forest services tell us that:
More than one-third of the land area of Canada (1.290.960 square miles, or 37%) is forested, in comparison with less than one-sixth (16%) considered to be of present or potential value for agriculture.
Our average annual depletion, used and lost (3,150 million cubic feet), is just about 1% of our total stand of commercial species (311.201 million cubic feet ).
On the subject of increment, or the annual growth offsetting annual depletion, our authorities start to hedge, usually contenting themselves with pointing out that our forest lands should be capable of producing more than we are using, as undoubtedly they should, and that growth is not more than one half of what they could be made to grow under only reasonably good management, which, again, unquestionably is right. Whether they are producing as much as we are using, and when we are going to have them under reasonably good management, are questions still to be answered.
Pattern Of Pioneer People
In the meantime, for fifty to three hundred years past, depending on the region, we have followed, Canada-wide, the historic pattern of pioneer people.
When the white man first came to Canada he found such an overpowering abundance of mature timber that he in his day and with his limited markets and manufacturing facilities and his preoccupation with the essentials of food and shelter, understandably was quite unable to conceive of any shortage of timber. Yet it is amazing how quickly the warning conditions developed. We are told that local industry suffered from exhaustion of accessible timber and fuel supplies before our people began to move west; but roads pushed farther afield, railways, canals, and streams improved for driving, brought relief from hitherto inaccessible regions. Always there was more timber beyond, and temporary embarrassments were soon forgotten. An approved pattern of "progress" and expansion developed in Ontario and held sway for decades. First, the surveyor was sent ahead of the outposts to establish the boundaries of new townships. Next, the logger was encouraged to remove the best of the timber as rapidly as possible. Finally, came the settler, who, without reference to the quality of the soil, was to turn "stump" land into a Garden of Eden. Unfortunately, forest land is not necessarily, indeed, seldom is, arable land. The settler eked out an existence at subsistence level for some years and then, broken and disillusioned, abandoned the attempt.
Quebec has borrowed Ontario's "1847" pattern for its "1947" settlement program.
The Maritime Provinces do not appear to have made any concentrated effort to colonize non-arable forest lands, but otherwise do not appear to have been able to see farther ahead in their forest problems, or to better insure their perpetuation, than the rest of the nation.
The rugged terrain of the Pacific Coast never did engender any rosy dreams of agricultural pre-eminence, but its vast expanse of forest did foster the equally disastrous and false impression of an "inexhaustible resource".
Only an isolated few have looked very far into the future and sounded any note of warning.
MacDonald's Forecast
Sir John A. MacDonald, looking daily down on the Ottawa River, wrote in June 1871 to the premier of Ontario:
"The sight of the immense masses of timber passing my windows every morning constantly suggests to my mind the absolute necessity there is for looking at the future of this great trade. We are recklessly destroying the timber of Canada and there is scarcely the possibility of replacing it. The quantity of timber reaching Quebec is annually decreasing and the fires in the woods are periodically destroying millions in money. What is to become of the Ottawa region generally, after the timber is cut away, one cannot foresee. It occurs to me that the subject should be looked in the face and some efforts made for the preservation of our timber. The Dominion government having no lands has no direct interest in the subject, but it seems to me that it would be a very good thing for the two governments of Ontario and Quebec to issue a joint commission to examine the whole subject and to report:
- As to the best means of cutting the timber after some regulated plan, as in Norway and the Baltic;
- As to replanting so as to keep up the supply as in Germany and Norway; and
- As to the best way of protecting the woods from fire.
Rise of Two Forest Schools
Sir Wilfred Laurier convened a historic forest conference at Ottawa in 1906, which had much to do with the awakening of an interest in Canada's forests and forest problems and the establishing of our first two Canadian Schools of Forestry at Toronto in 1907 and at U.N.B. in 1908.
Some theoretically excellent forest laws have been passed in some provinces but by and large the forests have been left to the not too tender mercies of private enterprise in the woods. We have suffered from an almost complete lack of an accurate knowledge of the extent of the resource, an accurate inventory, and from a lack of reliable data on growth rates. We have suffered from a lack of trained men to gather the essential data, analyse it, and to educate the public. We have suffered from the very abundance of our wood supply that always provided more a little further on while the most valuable and accessible forest lands close to centres of population were wastefully logged, burned, reburned, and permitted to develop into barren waste. Sir John A. MacDonald, looking down on the Ottawa River from his office window in 1871, was watering the "square timber" trade at its peak. To Sir John the timber trade mean: "square timber" of white pine. He accurately assessed the portent of his "annually decreasing" deliveries to the ships at Quebec, and we, too, seventy-five years later, know "there is scarcely the possibility of replacing it". But other frontiers, especially in British Columbia, other methods, and other uses postponed the reckoning which we now approach, and certainly will not be able to sidestep, as sawmills, railways, a Panama Canal, and Douglas fir enabled us to side-step exhaustion of the white pine.
We have taken a hasty glance back over the trend of forest history, but it is not our purpose here tonight to make excuses, or to shoulder blame onto our grandfathers. Rather, we seek to recognize a position and shape some future policy. Our grandfathers had their own problems and they met them in the tradition of English-speaking people in their own way. If by chance they made mistakes and left us somewhat less well provided for than they might that is a poor excuse for us to abandon our surest and most valuable source of wealth, or unwittingly, and dimwittedly, to let it slip through our fingers. The old forest of magnificent white pine is gone; spruce is reduced to fence rail proportions; and the majestic centuries old Douglas fir of the Pacific Coast is on its way out.
Canada never can be completely denuded of forest growth of some value. Our resources in forest lands are so great that nature will grow some timber in spite of the worst we can do. But nature's best in active competition with man's worst will be a poor and poverty-stricken substitute for what we might enjoy.
Liquidation
The simple fact is that so-called "forestry" in Canada to date has consisted of little more than the liquidation, usually wasteful liquidation, of a gift crop handed to us by nature. Logging is not forestry. Forestry is the growing of successive crops of wood in the greatest quantity and the highest quality that your land is capable of producing; and I do not know of any forest on any acre in Canada, with the possible exception of a few acres in Government and University experimental forests, that are being so managed. The history of our forest lands is written plainly in the woods for any who care to read, a history of steady deterioration in quality and quantity of wood produced; and the history is the same Canada-wide. Here in New Brunswick and the east, axe, ox team, and sailing ships of the early days slowed the process down to stretch it out over two hundred years. On the Pacific Coast, our power saws, logging railways, diesel trucks, and modern freighters, merely telescoped the process into a short fifty years. The end results have been much the same—denuded lands, deteriorated stands, and poor prospects for a second crop and established industries and communities.
The old forest, the gift of nature from which Canadians have drawn about twenty-five per cent, of their livelihood, is going, or gone. The "New Forest" will be no gift. It will be grown, cultivated, managed, and protected to maturity by us if we are to have forests worth the name at all.
Therein is the new challenge—a challenge as old as the forest problem, dating in Canada at least from Sir John A. MacDonald's concern for his white pine timbers, but ever new until it is faced and adequately disposed of.
"The New Challenge"
We have said that the forests rank high amongst our natural resources. They are not presently the greatest, but in a country approximating ninety per cent, forest land and so situated as to be admirably adapted to the growing of wood, they can be made the greatest without in any way detracting from the value of the others. The gross gain in forest values is net gain in national wealth. Nothing is detracted from anything else. They now account for a sufficiently great part of our living to be disastrous in their loss—and their progressive loss is more than a mere threat. Their influences impinge on every aspect of our life.
Foresters and conservationists have reiterated so often the forest's complementary functions in such matters as regulation of stream flow, control of floods and erosion, production of fur and game, and aesthetic values, that one feels that these influences, intangible as they are, have lost their impact on the well-informed audience. These values are there, they go with the forest and will be lost when we lose the forest, and, intangible as they are, their worth to the nation probably exceeds the value of all direct forest employment and income.
But forests reach still deeper down into our national and economic life. To choose a single significant example, we need more population in Canada. Vancouver Island (12.408 square miles) is approximately the size of Switzerland (1.944 square miles). Vancouver Island is richer than Switzerland in natural resources, enjoys one of the finest climates in the world, and has unequalled appeal to the tourist. The Island supports a population of 177,000, compared to Switzerland's 4.066,400 (1 to 23). This is a condition that is nothing short of dangerous in the present stare of world affairs and it is common Canada-wide. Vancouver Island's forests, put on a sustained yield managed basis, and supplemented with the processing industries they would support, would insure the future prosperity of its present population, and go far toward solving the labor and employment problem for the additional one or two million souls it should be called upon to support.
All this adds up to a challenge of first magnitude for the younger generation of Canadians. Budding young undergraduate foresters may have failed to find any great spiritual uplift in cruise lines that always run uphill, ring-infested stumps that defy counting, back-packing, mosquitoes, black flies, or in bough beds that never prove to be as soft or as aromatic as the poet would have us believe; but if they are to be foresters worth their salt they will in time find something in today's challenge to fire the imagination, to give incentive for great work, and to compensate in large measure for some of the dollars they need scarcely hope to amass in their chosen profession. On their shoulders, and on the Universities, in this forest-dependent country, will rest, in at least equal measure with agriculture and industry, the responsibility for feeding the Canadian people; and, in greater measure, the responsibility for Canada's cultural level and scale of living.
Infant Profession
We older, early graduates of our first forest schools, newcomers in an infant profession, had little chance to practice forestry. When I went first to British Columbia we still thought there that we had somewhere in the neighborhood of a two-hundred-year supply of virgin timber; and less than twenty years ago in that province I listened to one of our most prominent foresters ridicule the idea of sustained yield management before a meeting of the Canadian Society of Forest Engineers. Under the prevailing public sentiment and laws of the land, Canada-wide, our job, perforce, was to assist in the progressive liquidation of the existing asset. If in spite of that we managed to wedge in enough surveys, research, investigation, and education along rational forestry lines finally to break the ice of public indifference, as in most regions we have with the encouragement and connivance of a certain few farsighted legislators and the press, then we have accomplished about as much as reasonably could have been expected of us. But forest management is a very long-term undertaking and any drawing back, more particularly in the critical stages of early development, is likely to ruin all progress made to date.
It is significant that the press, our legislators, and people generally, have stopped referring to our "inexhaustible resources".
Even though the Dominion Government still fails to protect its own indirect but enormous income from forest resources by assisting the provinces in such matters as forest protection, responsible Ministers of the Crown have admitted the responsibility. In December, 1945, the Minister of Mines and Resources issued a statement which included this comment: "The nation cannot afford to see forests, as a source of raw materials, dissipated. It is believed that the Dominion could properly assist the orderly development of the national forest resources in two directions, first, by expanding activities for which it would be fully responsible, and second, by assisting through provision of funds to raise provincial standards in respect of the conservation, protection and development of the provincial forest resources."
British Columbia, by Royal Commission, has recently (January,1946), completed a second exhaustive study of the forest situation in that province and has within the past few weeks passed some of the most constructive and far-reaching sustained yield measures yet enacted in Canada.
Ontario and Saskatchewan have recently completed similar investigations.
The time is ripe, and the prospects were never brighter, for a concentrated effort on the part of the Canadian people to turn over a new leaf in forest management; to lift the forest resource out of the sink hole of liquidation and put it on the solid foundation of rational management. It will be a long process, stretching over the next hundred years, calling for unremitting vigilance, effort and leadership. Those responsibilities fall now, at a most critical period, on the forest schools and on the men now entering the forest profession.
Number Inadequate
Since the first classes were graduated about 1910 by the newly-established Forest Schools at Toronto and U.N.B, we have trained, as nearly as I have been able to learn, about nine hundred foresters, or an average of about twenty-five per year. During this University year now closing there were about one thousand students in the four forestry schools, and the prospects appear to be that this number will be increased by twenty-five per cent, in 1948. I detect some uneasiness as to whether Canada can absorb any such numbers of trained foresters.
In the light of the problems we have to solve that fear is ridiculous. The number is inadequate.
In the light of the values and profits involved, any such fear is short-sighted and clearly brands a timid and wavering approach to the development of our most valuable asset and business prospect.
Will Need Them
From the immediate, personal, but highly practical, standpoint of whether these men will be able to find a job, my opinion is that we will find employment for all who will be graduated from the present enrolment, and will continue to need foresters in like numbers. We have been deprived of the services of perhaps two hundred young foresters who normally would have been graduated during the war years. There are more than that number of forestry jobs vacant at the present time; and one thousand men in training does not mean one thousand foresters. There is a heavy normal "wastage" during the four or five years intervening between entrance and graduation. There is a
further wastage after graduation that always will be operative no matter how many positions may be vacant, or how urgently the men may be needed in the work for which they have trained. One thousand men in the schools probably means not more than one hundred graduated per year, of whom between fifty and seventy-five may be expected to be employed in forestry work after the lapse of ten years. In view of the fact that men with forestry training are always in demand in the closely allied activities of logging and manufacturing, the promising development in forestry practice which will call for more and more practicing foresters in industrial employ, the need for more men in the various Government Forest Services, and the obvious necessity of raising to professional level many jobs now occupied by "practical" men. I find considerable encouragement for the future of forestry and nothing to arouse fear in an enrolment of one thousand men in the Forest Schools.
Conclusion
We have endeavored this evening, in the course of less than 60 minutes, to make a quick summary of centuries of forest and wood history, and to relate that history to the present situation and future prospects in Canada.
Perhaps we have not made faster progress in applied forestry because we have tried to cover too much ground; because the few have wanted to move too fast and consequently have run into the stone wall of characteristic reluctance on the part of most people to abandon the old, or to adopt the new. Always, too, there has been the difficulty of "getting across" the proper perspective. Marie Antoinette, confronted with the inconceivable idea of the masses needing and crying for bread, is reported to have asked in amazement. "Why don't you give them cake?" Going about our affairs in Victoria at a temperature of 40 degrees above, it really means nothing to us when we read that Snag Creek is suffering at 80 degrees below (Daily Press, Feb. 3). You must have experienced 50 or 60 degrees below zero to imagine what 80 below means. The rich simply cannot appreciate the misery and frustration that goes with poverty, and Canada will find it extremely difficult to appreciate what a scarcity of wood will mean.
It is quite possible that we in Canada have been a little too rich for our own good, and certainly we have no general conception of what forest depletion will do to us as a nation. With our background we cannot conceive of any such thing as a ruinous wood shortage; and that ruinous shortage, if we permit it to come, has been developing, and will develop, so gradually that succeeding generations will have no clear-cut standards for comparison.
Canada has depended, and continues to depend, to such an extent on wood that, without it, and in spite of our other life-saving natural resources, we would be a poverty-stricken nation.
Always A Mainstay
Wood has always been a mainstay of the human race.
Today, the field of usefulness of wood and its value has so widened that we are quite justified in talking of the "New Wood" as if of an entirely new resource.
Canada depends on wood for about twenty-five per cent, of her income. The proportion is so great that its loss would be disastrous.
Deteriorated Forests
New Brunswick's forest resource has badly deteriorated. I need not quote authority. Go look at your woods.
Ontario has thousands of acres of drifting and eroding sands that once supported their most valuable white pine stands.
British Columbia has twenty million acres of denuded forest lands, and if lately applied measures, too recent to judge effects, do not have the desired results, we are adding to these denuded areas every year more acres than an expensive planting program of twenty million trees per year will rehabilitate.
A combination of circumstances have conspired to aggravate a situation already critical and now threatening to become worse.
Improvement and eventual remedy will arise out of a clear recognition of the facts, a will to remedy, and an adequate number of trained foresters for leadership and technical direction. Foresters of the right calibre and in sufficient numbers will hasten the public education and crystalize the will.
Century And A Half
For nearly one hundred and fifty years U.N.B. has been doing the work that the small University is best fitted to accomplish, sending out into the world a steady leaven of educated young men and women, unspoiled by luxury, serious-minded, of high ideals, and admirably adapted and equipped for leadership. After an absence of twenty-seven years, during which I have had some opportunity to observe apparently more favored centres of learning, I have no desire to see U.N.B. a “great institution” in the commonly accepted sense of the term. Already for more than one hundred years U.N.B. has been great in its service in New Brunswick and Canada. I confidently expect it to be greater in that best sense of the word—and in this "new" field of forestry it has an unequalled opportunity to add measurably to its greatness.
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