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After the war, what ?

All thinking men ask that question. For lumber, for example, there will be a shattered, war-torn world to rebuild. In all the theaters of conflict habitations and buildings of every sort are being destroyed literally by the tens of thousands. And they must be rebuilt, and the weary world will look to us for building materials.

Here at home the practical stagnation of civilian building creates a reservoir of housing needs that is growing into stupendous figures. And it will continue to grow until the conflict ends and we go back to the solemn task of bringing the housing situation in this country, up to the level of its modern needs.

It is logical to assume that the lumber industry is one that should know no slackening or let down of any consequence when the war ends. For then the reconstruction really starts on all continents. There should be vital and terrific need for everything our mills can produce for a decade to ,come. Only something tragic in the world's financial and economic systems, like unrestrained inflation or a dramatic depression, should be able to shake the firm situation of lumber.

The first thing that will happen to lumbpr production when the war ends, will be an immediate let down in the production of most species. Uncounted mills that are now cutting trees to meet the war demands that otherwise would be left to stand and grow for years to come, will quit that sort of operating. And in contrast to this certain diminishment of production we will find more than ten thousand sawmills and more than thirty thousand retail and wholesale lumber yards-practically empty of stocks. Some time they must be refilled. If the mills had no demand for lumber whatever for a year after the war, they could keep busy doing nothing but normalizing lumber stocks and inventories. But naturally there will be heavy calls upon their production, and the normal expectation is that it will take a long long time, adding just a little as circumstances permit, for the mills and yards to restore anything like normalcy in their stocks on hand. They have been running practically empty now for many months, with little hope of any decided change until the war ends.

When you go to postwar planning, you can put it down in the book with considerable confidence, that only a financial debacle of some sort can keep the lumber business from enjoying a powerful demand for all its products for long years after the war ends. There need be no dramatic switch from war to peace-time operations. Sales and distribution will slip noiselessly back from war selling to civilian selling at home; and to the supplying of foreign demands as best they may, under the circumstances that will then present themselves.

No American industry seems so secure in its certainty of a postwar market as lumber.