Vagabond Editorials

By Jack Dionne

I've said this same thing in these columns innumerable times, but Arthur Brisbane says it in a way that drives it home in a recent editorial: "Prosperity for the next few months depends on the mental attitude of the people and their private talking. No Presidenj, no collection of hundred million dollar men, no promises to spend billions, can wipe out the bad effects of a nationally pessimistic mood".

Rightot

I think things are going to be very much all right. These financial experts make their deductions in a difrerent wrl, but one of the pillars of my thought is the fact that even since the break in the market the American people have paid tens of millions of dollars to see football games. That doesn't indicate pessimism, or tight money. A lot of football games have taken in as high as a quarter of a million dollars each at the gate. Find a better indication of the national mental attitude tlrai thit.

The smoke will clear away fast after the holidays. Things will brighten up and business will pick up very fast. Donlt doubt it. Get ready for it. Help bring it about by knowing it's going to happen. In retrospect the stock market crash that caused all our present troubles will be seen as an absolute necessity. It had to happen. And it will be all for the best. When a whole nation gets into a craP game and all of them seem to be winning, you'll never break up the game. The route we are taking is the only way out.

And those employees of yours ! Listen, mill men ! Right here at this Christmas period is a terrible time to close the mills and take away from those working men and their wives and children, their hope of a decent Christmas. I wouldn't do it. It isn't fair. Just becaus€ you haven't intestinal fortitude enough to cut up lumber without rushing out into the highways and by-ways and giving it away to the first person you see, is not the fault of the men who make that lumber for you. I believe in sensible curtailment' properly done, but there is a humanitarian problem here that ranks higher than the lumber market. If you want to help create prosperity and help get things back into shape for the new year, keep as many men employed aF you can. If you need a guardian to keep you from giving away your lumber-hire one. But give these thousands of men and their families a chance at Christmas time.

Itls been interesting to watch the antics of the lumber industry during the past thirty days. Down through a long sequence of years, by experience after experience that left never the slightest room for doubt, there has been driven home to the mentality of the lumber iqdustry, these unanimously admitted facts: First, when something happens to bring depression, and the lumber market starts to slip, cutting prices invariably serves to accelerate the depression, and instead of inducing people to buy, it scares them out of the market entirely; second, they rush in and buy always on a climbing market, and the faster it climbs, the more insistent the U"**9.

Every lumberman, north, east, south and west, will admit the truth of those two statements. Price cutting on a depressed market always kills the detnand entirely. Price climbing brings them in. And yet, when the stock market crashed and the demand for lumber-and for everything else-became temporarily patalyzed, these same lumbermen who know all these things, who have the same experience over and over again since lumber history began, went right out, just as they did twenty-five years ago, and began slashing prices, trying to revive a demand which took price into consideration not at all. And, as it has always done, this action simply scared every prospective buyer into a hole from which he is never going to emerge until the market starts the other way. Aren't they funny folks, these sawmill men? Men who would declaim to you in normal times the truths just stated, rushed right out to prove that they are just as foolish as ever-have learned nothing by experienge.

LUMBER BUYING WILL BEGIN WHEN LUMBER PRICE CUTTING STOPS ! Is that plain enough for you unwise ones who insist on elaylg this game backwards?

John Hill, well known lumber dealer and philosopher of the Texas Panhandle, told the lumbermen of New Mexico the other day that in operating a retail lumber business they should be Cautious, Courteous, Candid, Cheerful, Constant, and Courageous. And he said that the three prime requisites of success are Capital, Competency, and Character. In the old days we dwelt on the three 'W's, Wim, Wigor, and Witatity, and on the three I's, Industry, fntelligence, and Intestines'

Southern Yellow Pine, which incorporated into its grading rules during the last year the moisture content of the wood, is laying great stress on the greater value of dry

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