1885.] SUPPLIES OF TIMBER FROM ABROAD. 179 



Instead of a scarcity of growing timber in Sweden, as alarmists 

 would have us believe, there is at the present time such a pletliora 

 of Swedish wood in the market, that the syndicate of Swedish 

 sawmill owners and timber exporters is at its wits-end how to 

 cause an artificial scarcity, so as to hinder the present unremunera- 

 tive prices from falling to a ruinous point. The syndicate finds 

 that many of the sawmill owners cannot reduce their output 

 of logs from the necessity they are under of clearing rented 

 ground of heavy timber before the expiration of their respec- 

 tive leases, more particularly in the large extent of country to 

 the north of Stockholm, with its outlet to the Gulf of Bothnia, 

 and supplying six-sevenths of the sawn timber exported from 

 Sweden. When it is borne in miud that the majority of these 

 leases have from ten to twenty-five years yet to run, and that 

 nothing less than trees holding at least 1 1 in. diameter at fifteen feet 

 from the ground can be cut, according to the terms of many of the 

 leases, there is every reason one may pause before accepting the 

 dogma that growers of wood in this country may profitably compete 

 in producing similar building timber to the bulk of that now 

 obtained from Sweden. This reasoning also applies in a still 

 greater degree to what is known in the Board of Trade returns as 

 hewn wood, but which actually consists mostly of pit props and 

 other descriptions of mining timber. It may be taken as an axiom, 

 that in all colliery or other mining districts, where the cost of 

 transportation from the ship's side on the east coast of England or 

 Scotland to the mouth of the mine is under ten shillings per ton 

 of fifty cubic feet, and where the red and white fir of Scandinavia 

 serves equally as well as British timber, it will never pay land- 

 owners in this country that have their markets in the districts 

 indicated to make the growing of such wood the basis of their 

 policy as long as the fiscal systems of both countries remain un- 

 altered. Both in Sweden and Norway the quantity of pit props and 

 mining timber obtainable is practically unlimited, and the cost of 

 getting the same out of the woods into English ports surprisingly 

 low, thanks to an extended system of water-carriage. 



Norway, as far as the quantity of heavy wood suitable for saw- 

 ing is concerned, is suffering from partial exhaustion — an exhaustion 

 caused, no doubt, equally as much by the almost incredibly wasteful 

 way in which the Norwegian forests were managed up to about 

 1850, as by the subsequent inroads of sawmill owners. During 

 the last decade, however, the wealthiest of the millowners have 

 begun to buy up denuded or partially-denuded tracts of forest for 

 the purpose of putting tlie same under a rational system of forestry, 

 while the " Odalmeu " or small landowners of the country, cog- 



