whole matter, and we have never been able to get a foot from shore on it. I would suggest that such a committee be appointed in the future to review the whole matter and bring back a report as a guide for you gentlemen here in your handling of these appropriations.

REFORESTATION

There is one other thing I would like to mention. It is a little off the subject, but it was brought up by the speaker that preceded us-about these reforestation seedlings. The same question there concerning the industries affected, I think, it would be very well to consider. Personally I am very much in favor of reforestation, and I know our trade is as a whole. However, we have seen so many of these reforestation seedlings given out in small lots to private individuals for their own home beautification, and there is such a very small percentage of them that grow into timber, that we feel, if there is any big movement of that kind undertaken or continued, that the association of nurserymen, who really make their livelihood throughout the country by growing trees, should be given some consideration. As I see it, it is a very good case of Government interference with business.

Right in our own State of New Jersey we have a reforestation department, and they will let millions of acres burn over every year with fires and do more damage there with respect to the reproduction of new timber, in one fire a year, than can be made up by the good they do in planting new seedlings. Personally, I think it is a lot of bunk, myself.

Mr. BUCHANAN. You say they will let it burn over?

Mr. FLEMMER. No; they do not let it burn over intentionally, but they can not put it out. In other words, if they would organize all their efforts toward fire protection, they would go a whole lot further. Mr. MEEHAN. In Philadelphia 95 per cent of the seedlings are given away, and only 5 per cent are planted on State lands.

Mr. SUMMERS. Mr. Chairman, I want to say to these two witnesses, representing the organizations that they do, that my attitude as a friend to agriculture and horticulture in every respect is certainly well established. I am for maintaining quarantines or making investigations or whatever is necessary in regard to any and all of these pests that are really destructive. But I want to suggest, very respectfully, that your organizations start in systematically to reeducate this country in regard to what the corn borer has not done and is never going to do. We have spent, over my vigorous and persistent protests, between 18 and 20 millions of dollars on a pest that has never done to exceed a hundred thousand dollars of damage in any one year in this country in the 25 years that it has been here. You have those quarantines because of the jellow journals, and that movement has been furthered by many scientific men. If you want to get rid of useless quarantines, and do not want to have these impediments put on your legitimate business, you had better take the situation in hand and start reeducating the people.

The corn borer problem has been solved, and it is perfectly useless to spend millions of dollars in quarantines against celery, and to have silly things of that sort going on because of the scare that has been built up in the minds of the people. The Agriculture Department

has long since demonstrated that reasonably clean farming is the remedy for the corn borer. They have also told us positively and repeatedly that it can not be exterminated and its spread can not be prevented as long as I am in Congress. I shall continue to oppose wasting the taxpayers' money. Tell the people the whole truth about the corn borer and the quarantines will soon disappear, and big expenditures will not be necessary.

Mr. MEEHAN. That is exactly right, and we have been trying to do it; but unfortunately it is a thing that costs money, and while we can do a little bit of it at a time, there is only a certain amount that we can do, because everything that we do has to be paid for.

Mr. HART. NO; your organization can issue statements and they will publish your statements.

Mr. MEEHAN. Yes; we are getting some of it in that way.

Mr. HART. If you know how to handle propaganda, you can just feed it to the newspapers. If you do not know how to handle propaganda, I will make a suggestion. You go to the Federal Farm Board, and they will tell you how to handle propaganda.

Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you. Unfortunately that sort of thing is something that I am not familizr with. I am not a publicist; I am not an advertising man. I am simply an everyday nurseryman, trying to do what I can along these lines.

Mr. HART. They used $38,000 last year for special writers for that propaganda.

Mr. MEEHAN. All of these pests, I will grant you, only do a fraction of the damage that they are supposed to do. Take my nursery, for instance. I have been in the quarantine zone for 12 or 13 years, and I can not honestly say that the Japanese beetle has done me 10 cents' worth of damage so far as my nursery stock is concerned, but it has cost me thousands of dollars to live up to the quarantines. But we have got those quarantines, and unless we have them we have got to go out of business; and that is all we are asking, that we be permitted to stay in business.

Mr. BUCHANAN. You do not mean to say that the Japanese beetle does not do any harm?

Mr. MEEHAN. I will take an oath that the Japanese beetle has not done 10 cents' worth of damage in my nursery in 13 years, and I have 220 acres.

Mr. BUCHANAN. I am not talking about your nursery. How about the general proposition; is it a pest or not?

Mr. MEEHAN. I do not think it is anywhere near the pest that it is considered to be. It is a pest, certainly. So is the rose bug; so is the June beetle; so are a hundred other things that we have in the garden. The rose bug does as much damage to the roses as the Japanese beetle does to the roses. I have seen trees defoliated just as badly through rose bugs as I have through Japanese beetles in my country.

Mr. BUCHANAN. Are there as many of them?

Mr. MEEHAN. Just as many of them.

Mr. HART. You think the damage has been magnified?

Mr. MEEHAN. The damage has been magnified hundreds of per

cent.

Mr. HART. We are glad to get that information.

Mr. MEEHAN. I think the thing is nowhere near as bad as it has been painted. But we are up against the situation, gentlemen. Here we are. We have got these quarantines and unless they are maintained we have simply got to go out of business, because we can not ship our stock. To be perfectly frank, we are in a jam, because just as soon as the quarantine is lifted in this section, we get an embargo all around the country; right around us, and nobody in that section can do a particle of business outside of the Japanese beetle zone, and he can not do it entirely inside the zone. Take the State of Rhode Island, where beetles have been found in a dozen places. The State entomologist told me right out, "Unless the Japanese beetle quarantine is maintained, we in the State of Rhode Island will place an absolute embargo against the State of Pennsyl vania and the State of New Jersey." And yet they have got beetles in practically all parts of the State. Maryland will do it in 10 minutes after the quarantine is lifted. I know that. All you have got to do is to ask Professor Simonds, of the Maryland State Department, and he will tell you they will place an embargo. Ohio will place an embargo. Illinois will place an embargo. Mr. Glenn wanted to do it a couple of years ago on phony peach, and I advised him not to; and he has got phony peach to-day.

Mr. HART. If the Department of Agirculture, through its proper officers, would try to build up a feeling between the States that these pests are not quite as bad as they are painted, you would have more amity and would get along a lot better.

Mr. MEEHAN. I will give you the history of that situation. Since Mr. Strong has been the head of the Plant Quarantine and Control Administration, things have been one thousand per cent better. We have not had any of that propaganda; not a fraction of it; practically none of it; and we have had 100 per cent cooperation. He has made the statement at various hearings that this Japanese beetle is nothing to what was originally expected.

Mr. HART. That is the Department of Agriculture?

Mr. MEEHAN. The Plant Quarantine and Control Administration. It is a part of the Department of Agriculture.

Now, since Mr. Strong has been there, I will be perfectly frank to say that Mr. Strong has given 100 per cent cooperation. We have given him 100 per cent cooperation. He has cut out 90 per cent of the foolishness that went before. He has cut down this road-patrol business to the very minimum. That is a fact, right in Pennsylvania, and I can prove it to you.

Mr. SUMMERS. He is a very capable, high-class man.

Mr. MEEHAN. He has been a wonderful man for us, and he has reduced the expenses of that department tremendously compared to what they would have been under Doctor Marlatt.

We want Mr. Strong, and we want that department. We do not want that department merged with the previous department in some way, so that it gets back to the old question of where we get all the propaganda on these various pests in a desire to build up the department. Mr. Strong has not in any way tried to build up that department; he has tried to restrict the department. He is not working on the basis that he has got to put these things through. He wants to do it efficiently, and that is all.

We are very strong for Mr. Strong, because we know that with him we will not be interfered with any more than is absolutely necessary, and that no more money than necessary will be spent for that work. I thank you.

FOREST SURVEY

STATEMENT OF HON. HOMER C. PARKER, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF GEORGIA

Mr. PARKER. Mr. Chairman, I wish to present to the committee Col. E. George Butler of Savannah, Ga., who is spokesman for a delegation from the Forestry Associations of Florida and Georgia. I hope you will hear from Colonel Butler and then he will present the other members of his committee. Colonel Butler.

STATEMENT OF COL. E. GEORGE BUTLER, VICE PRESIDENT JOHN G. BUTLER CO., SAVANNAH, GA.

Colonel BUTLER. Mr. Chairman and members of this committee, I have with me Mr. Carl Speh, the secretary of the Pine Institute of America; Mr. M. L. Rue, president of the Brunswick Peninsular Co.; Mr. R. L. Benedict, vice president of the Brunswick Peninsular Co.; and Mr. George H. Myers, a director of the Brunswick Peninsular Co.

I do not want to take any more time than may be necessary to present this matter to the committee.

A year ago I was appointed chairman of a committee composed of the Georgia and Florida State Forestry Associations, with a view to getting, if possible, a timber survey, which was authorized in 1928, continued down there in that section of the country.

A nation-wide forest survey was authorized under the McNaryMcSweeney Act in 1928. Field work has been under way for three years, mainly in the Douglas fir region of the Pacific Northwest and more recently, in the hardwood forests of the Lower Mississippi Valley.

Under this act, Congress is authorized to appropriate as much as $270,000 per annum for the survey, but has never appropriated the full amount in any year. The appropriation for the current year is $170,000. Of this amount only about $50,000 is available for field work in the South. It is being devoted to completing the field work in the Mississippi River hardwoods and the upland pines in the State of Mississippi, leaving no adequate funds with which to start field work in any other section of the South.

Efforts to get the Department of Agriculture to shift funds from one appropriation to another, or allotted funds from other sections of the country to the South, has been unsuccessful. While the department has expressed entire sympathy with and appreciation of the urgent need for the extension of a survey into Georgia and Florida, it has been unable to consider closing down or curtailing the work already started in the West. Our efforts to obtain funds from our two States and provide contributions from the several interested agencies, have, on account of present conditions, been unsuccessful. It appears, therefore, that the early extension of the forest survey into the Southeast is dependent upon an increase in the Federal

appropriation for the coming fiscal year over the amount now available to the extent of the cost of the survey.

It is estimated that a survey such as would be carried out to cover the long leaf slash pine of Georgia and Florida could be accomplished with an addition to the present appropriation of $50,000.

We have no idea of asking you to discontinue the good work you are doing, but we feel that for an additional $150,000 the varied timber interests involved would bring back millions and millions of dollars of value.

The factors and conditions which underline our request for an immediate extension of the survey to the Southeast are:

In southeastern Georgia and north Florida, within a gross area of about 25,000,000 acres, there is located admittedly the finest forest region east of the Rocky Mountains. In this region is concentrated a great part of the naval stores industry that formerly spread ov er the pine belt in the six Gulf States. Eighty-five per cent of all of the naval stores produced in the United States is obtained from the forests of this region. Intermixed with the pine are many acres of cypress and swamp hardwoods, and the region produces more cypress lumber and ties than any other region in the South. In addition to naval stores, this section is a very important producing center for lumber, poles, piling, and railroad ties, and offers the largest potential supply of pulpwood in the East. The forests of this region constitute a very large part of the industrial and economic assets of the two States. A tremendous proportion of the capital used in industry in the South is tied up in this area, and the care, utilization, manufacture, and marketing of forests products is the outstanding outlet for both capital and labor.

In this region it is most evident that the future livelihood and prosperity of the people generally, and of industries, financial agencies, transportation, and shipping are all bound up, and depend upon an accurate knowledge of what the resource is, how fast it is being depleted, how rapidly it is being replaced, and what steps are necessary, first, to insure industry against future difficulties; and, second, to know what steps to take to get the greatest returns to the public from these resources.

There has never been any survey or inventory of the timber resources of this important region, and, as a consequence, there is a complete lack of the accurate information that must form the essential foundation for present and future plans for financing, for operating and for marketing, and for the proper care and development of the resources. All of the many agencies that are at work in, or connected with, this section are hampered seriously and because they lack an authoritative inventory of what is on hand, and accurate information as to what may be expected in the future. This confusion and uncertainty ramifies throughout the economic structure of the Southeast and as well as into the large consuming industries of the country as a whole, who must look to this section for their supply of raw material. All of the naval stores, for instance, used in the United States, are produced in the South and 85 per cent of it is produced in this one region.

The stabilization of the several industries and commercial agencies depend upon the utilization of the timber resources of this region, is highly important to the people generally in the two States, because