(14 Sir John Stirling IVlaxwell [March 16, 



or sovereign give the State a direct interest in its success ; and, 

 secondly, because it is recognized that an industry which is out of 

 scale with the span of human life stands in peculiar need of encourage- 

 ment and guidance, and really concerns the State as it never can 

 concern any private individual. This last factor of time lies so close 

 to the heart of the subject that we may consider it a little more 

 closely. When some one writes a bool^ of the psychology of different 

 occupations, he will recognize in the forester a man who is so much 

 outlived by the crop he cultivates that it becomes a second nature to 

 him to think and plan outside his own lifetime — a man who can 

 seldom hope to see, even in old age, the full result of what he begins 

 as a boy. Sad ? Yes ; and foresters hate dying more than most 

 people, i3ut such work is inspiring. You do not pity the astronomer 

 peering out into space or the historian diving back into time because 

 their feet cannot follow their thoughts. You need not pity the 

 forester Ijecause his job is bigger than himself. But certain practical 

 difficulties attach to the cultivation of so slow a crop, and these must 

 be faced. When seventy to one hundred years elapse between seed 

 time and harvest, scientific cultivation is no easy matter, and early 

 mistakes are paid for very dear. Still more severe are the financial 

 trials. Consider the case of new ground to be planted. The man 

 who plants may lock up his money for seventy to one hundred years, 

 lose the rent of his land, and, in addition, have to pay rates and 

 taxes and cost of maintenance for a property which cannot bring in a 

 penny until such time as the sale of thinnings may help to defray 

 these charges. The cleverest prospectus could not make this invest- 

 ment tempting to beings whose years are but three score and ten. 

 Or take the case of a forest inherited as a going concern, Ijringing in 

 a regular annual income as each block is cut and replanted in suc- 

 cession. By increasing the fellings and scamping the work of 

 replanting, the owner can at any moment double the income for his 

 own life at the expense of his successor. You see the point ? A 

 man may have many motives for planting or maintaining woods, but 

 they are not the ordinary motives which, whether we like them or 

 not, are the mainsprings of ordinary commercial effort. These con- 

 siderations, together with the desire to make the most of woods 

 under its ow^n control, have led the State in every country, from 

 France; to Japan, to regard the care of forests as one of its primary 

 duties. 



Here the State has for several generations Ijeen innocent of such 

 ideas. Let us see why. We have, for reasons which will appear 

 later, no natural forests of consequence, while the forests belonging 

 to the Crown are few and comparatively small. Yet a hundred 

 years ago the principles of sound forestry were ])oth understood and 

 practised in this country, and we Avere little, if at all, behind our 

 European neighbours. In the period of vigorous and enlightened 

 rural development which marked the end of the eighteenth and 



