1884.] ON ENGLISH FORESTRY. 193 



ON ENGLIS}[ FOIIKSTRY. 

 HE letters we have printed on American Forests may recall 

 attention to an interesting discussion which took place 

 in the House of Commons. On that occasion Sir John 

 Lubbock secured for himself the hearty sympathy and thanks 

 of all who still yearn after the landscape of old l^higland, more 

 beautiful though less profitable than the pathless woods of the 

 New World, in which Englishmen are now invited to invest. 

 With scarcely an exception, these sympathisers are the whole 

 of our countrymen. We are all ' Foresters ' by nature. We all 

 love trees and their inhabitants. We all pine for the woods, 

 from which we feel banished by the sad necessity of earning a 

 livelihood, or acquiring a position, amid less picturesque scenes. 

 As a matter of sentiment, of science, and, as it appears, of 

 imperial utility, we ought to know trees and all about them. 

 They are the most magnificent of Nature's productions. They 

 are structures grander even than our most costly edifices, 

 frequently more lasting, and never obsolete in style or fashion. 

 This particular branch of creative power is the most envied 

 prerogative of our aristocracy. They have parks ; they can keep 

 them up ; they can even make them. A man of great intellect 

 in the last generation, who did not quite know whether to 

 worship the gentry or to excommunicate them, said at last he 

 knew not what good they did except that they made England 

 picturesque. Yet the fearful question Cut bono ? must imme- 

 diately present itself to everybody who attempts to measure 

 forestry by the ParUamentary scale. It appears we do actually 

 want men learned and practised in forestry for the restoration 

 of our forests in India, and that, perhaps, Ireland may be planted 

 here and there with advantage, but, unhappily, there is no 

 investment so slow, so precarious, so likely to be unremunerative, 

 as planting of all kinds. The planter must be a rich man. He 

 must have more money than land, or writs either, his neighbours 

 will often say. It is indifferent land he is dealing with, for he 

 cannot afford to lose the certain and immediate harvests of his 

 good land. He has to bury his capital in the soil for many years. 

 He has to trench, to dig, to weed, to fence, to protect from 

 depredation, and to wage a continual war with wind, frost, and 

 drought. He seldom escapes the fate of those who work for 

 others, not for themselves. In a few years he may begin to thin, 

 and his successors in the next generation may have something 

 like timber to dispose of But when the forest has been at last 

 created, there comes the greatest difficulty of all. It is a difficulty 

 upon which we wish to speak tenderly and cautiously, for it is a 



