“I thought it was made out of old rags,” Peanut answered.
“It is,” said Rob.
“Well—what——”
Everybody laughed. “Newspaper is made of wood pulp—spruce and balsam almost entirely,” said the Scout Master, taking pity on Peanut. “Linen paper, such as the kind you write letters on, is made out of linen rags. The newspapers use up so much paper for their great Sunday editions, especially, that they are really doing almost more to strip the forests than the lumbermen, because they don’t even have to wait till the trees get good sized.”
“Why can’t they use anything except spruce and balsam?” asked Lou. “Won’t other kinds of wood make paper?”
“They’ll make paper,” said Mr. Rogers, “but the fibre isn’t tough enough to stand the strain of the presses. You know, a newspaper press has to print many thousands of copies an hour; it runs at high speed. The paper is on a huge roll, and it unwinds like a ribbon into the press. It has to be tough enough so that it won’t break as it is being unwound. There’s a fortune waiting for the man who can invent a tough paper which can be made out of cornstalks, or something which can be grown every year, like a crop. Think how it would save our forests! I’m told that every Sunday edition of a big New York newspaper uses up about eleven acres of spruce.”
“Gee, Sunday papers ain’t worth it!” Art exclaimed.
“They are not, that’s a fact,” Mr. Rogers agreed.
“I don’t see,” Lou put in, “why a paper mill couldn’t buy up a great tract of woodland, and then forest it scientifically, taking out the big trees every year, and planting little ones. I shouldn’t think it would cost any more than it would to haul lumber to the mills from all over creation.”
“It wouldn’t, Lou,” said Mr. Rogers, “but we in America haven’t learned yet to do things that way. Our big mills and business concerns are all too careless and selfish and wasteful. And the public is paying the penalty. Look at that——”