1032 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



able for construction purposes and for pit-props, and 

 you will remember before the war the timber trade was 

 constantly telling us that our products were not equal to 

 foreign goods for those purposes. It was not true, we 

 didn't believe it to be true at the time, and the experience 

 of the war has shown that it is not true ; and although, 

 of course, a great deal of the timber that has been cut 

 has been used green and unseasoned, owing to the haste 

 with which its utilization has been required, yet it has 

 been proved to be of fine quality. It is no exaggeration 

 to say that if it had not been for what landowners of 

 this country have done in the way of planting in past 

 years, not only without any encouragement from the 

 Government, but in the face of great discouragement of 

 every kind, this country could not have carried on the war. 



"Now, what 

 is the position 

 after the war ? 

 Practically we 

 may say that 

 the supply of 

 coniferous tim- 

 ber is exhaust- 

 ed. Every- 

 thing that 

 could be possi- 

 bly utilized in 

 the way of 

 coniferous tim- 

 ber will be 

 utilized, before 

 the period of a 

 normal supply 

 of shipping for 

 1 m p orts after 

 the war has 

 been restored. 

 There will be 

 n o coniferous 

 timber in this 

 country, except 

 very young 

 p 1 an t a tions, 

 and compara- 

 tively few of 

 them. There 

 will have been 

 great inroads made upon our ash, the supply of oak will 

 not have been very materially impaired, but such trees 

 as poplars and certain classes of elm will have been 

 largely cut into, and the problem of reafforestation zvill 

 at once become acute. 



"If we were caught — which God forbid — in any 

 war of this magnitude thirty years hence, and there had 

 been no replanting on a sufficient scale, the country would 

 be in a very bad jjosition from the very beginning. So 

 far as we can foresee, it would be impossible to keep our 

 mines going on imported pit-props. Therefore, as a mere 

 measure of national safety, apart altogether from the 



importance of the forestry industry in any civilized 

 country, it has certainly become necessary for the Gov- 

 ernment itself to become the owners of forests, and the 

 planter of forests, and to establish a Forest Authority 

 which would own millions of acres, and, gradually, under 

 a proper and well-thought-out system of rotation, estab- 

 lish forests on the French or German model." 



HISTORY OF BRITISH FORESTS 



In order to obtain a clear idea of the condition of for- 

 estry in the United Kingdom at the outbreak of the war 

 it is necessary to know something of its history during 

 the last century, for it was chiefly within that period that 

 the woods felled during the war were planted and tended. 

 From the middle ages onwards the State attempted to 



prom ote the 

 c u 1 tivation of 

 timber by leg- 

 islative meth- 

 ods, but con- 

 trary to the 

 custom on the 

 c o n t i nent of 

 Europe, a very 

 small pro por- 

 tion (less than 

 3 per cent) of 

 the area of 

 woods in Great 

 Britain re- 

 mained under 

 State control. 

 T h e pre-war 

 c o n d ition of 

 British woods 

 w a s therefore 

 the result of 

 the action of 

 economic and 

 social forces 

 on which the 

 State has had 

 little direct in- 

 fluence. It had 

 been profound- 

 ly affected by 

 the fact that 

 unlimited supplies of cheap imported timber were avail- 

 able during the greater ])art of the 19th century, while the 

 steady rise in prices which marked its close had, when 

 war broke out, only begun to affect the management 

 of British woods. 



Both English and Irish private woods of the early 19th 

 century consisted mainly of hardwoods, remnants of the 

 once extensive indigenous forests. In Scotland only 

 were parts of the indigenous forests coniferous, but by 

 the beginning of the last century they had been reduced to 

 an inconsiderable area. Private woods supplied the 

 greater part of the material required for rural and gen- 



Briliih Official Pholograph 



BRITISH OPERATION IN A FRENCH FOREST 



Sonic sixty thousand tons of pit-wood were cut by the British in the French forests and were shipped to 

 England for use in the mines. The photograph shows a member of a South African labor unit. 



