Cost Accountant

RICH LAND, POOR LAND--Stuart Chase --Whittlesey House ($2.50).

Among U. S. economists. Stuart Chase has a reputation for being the best storyteller of the lot. Master of the art of leading audiences up the mountain, he has held out bold and attractive visions of happy economic futures, plausible-sounding and easily-attained, in most of the sprightly, bright, informal, argumentative volumes he has written in the past eleven years. Interspersing his books with anecdotes, personal reminiscences, moral tirades against waste, he has always discussed human problems as an economist, economic problems as an evangelist, political problems as an engineer, and philosophic problems as an irascible citizen who wants to know why something is not done. Last week Stuart Chase offered a typical volume to stand beside his The Tragedy of Waste. In Rich Land, Poor Land, he discusses for 347 pages the natural resources of the U. S., their exhaustion, misapplication, cost and preservation.

The book is somewhat like an old-fashioned geography turned upside down. Beginning with a discussion of rivers, plains, mountain ranges, rainfall, Stuart Chase proceeds to long, eloquent, angry lament on the squandering of native riches. Like the Whitman of a bankrupt country, he composes a great catalog of lost national wealth, including the buffalo, the passenger pigeon, eastern salmon, Pacific halibut, petroleum, timber, coal, the great auk, the Carolina parakeet, the drought-impoverished Dust Bowl. It is a disturbing account, calculated to make any responsible citizen treasure every green tree and each clear brook of his native land. The oyster catch declined from 25 million bushels in 1901 to 16 million in 1926. Beavers "were butchered to make ugly hats," thereby removing a genial animal as well as causing floods. In 1857 the Ohio legislature decided that passenger pigeons "the most abundant and the most beautiful of American game birds," needed no protection. The last existing specimen died in Cincinnati in 1914. "One solitary heath hen was living at last accounts."* The catch of Pacific salmon has dropped from ten million pounds annually to less than one million. Enough timber is destroyed by forest fires every year to build a five-room house every 100 feet on both sides of the road from New York to Chicago, although the effect of that, Stuart Chase observes, "might be worse than the conflagration."

Most readers are likely to feel that Economist Chase's remedy is as dubious as his account of the need for its telling. With high praise for the Tennessee Valley Authority, for the Civilian Conservation Corps and other public work projects, he envisions a great campaign to protect U. S. resources that would create five million jobs, stop unemployment and beautify the country as well. For arguments about costs he has shrewd answers, pointing out that Boulder Dam, by preventing a flood in 1935. saved the Imperial Valley at least $10,000,000. Holding that confidence is the basic need, he gives brief, effective accounts of projects in Sweden, Russia, England. Readers may be dazzled by Stuart Chase's bold vision of a happier future for their country but they are more likely to close Rich Land, Poor Land, with an uneasy feeling that Author Chase has pulled some white rabbits out of his statistics, that there must be greater obstacles to his program than he admits.

*Stuart Chase, far behind the times, does not report that the last of this species was given up for dead in 1932. Three survivors remained on Martha's Vineyard until 1928, dwindled to a ten-year-old heath cock that regularly appeared at its traditional courting field, ''boomed" and cockled in a forlorn effort to attract a mate. Efforts to mate it with the prairie chicken proving unsuccessful, the lonely fowl abandoned its solitary courtship in the spring of 1930, was seen for the last time in March, 1932.

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