DEPUTATION TO PRESIDENT OF BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 489 



it in the forests, say of Germany, where you get tall straight 

 trees shooting up like so many poles, with nothing except a 

 top— no branches, and nothing ornamental or beautiful about 

 them. That, no doubt, is the proper way to grow timber 

 for commercial purposes, but it is not the principle upon 

 which we manage our woods in England. Here the indi- 

 vidual, as a rule, considers to a greater or less extent not only 

 the sporting purposes of woods, but he is also very proud of his 

 ornamental timber ; and there is no doubt that that old feeling 

 stands very much in the way of growing, as you suggest, timber 

 merely for commercial purposes. Then again, people say that 

 there is a great deal of waste land in England. I am not quite 

 sure if, after all, that is not really exaggeration. No doubt there 

 is a good deal of land both in Scotland and portions of England 

 where the return brought in by the land is very small. But it is 

 quite possible that that area is not a very large one, because, after 

 all, even land called "waste" does bring in for sporting or other 

 purposes a fair rental, and gives to the landlord a more im- 

 mediate return, and perhaps even a greater return over a large 

 number of years, than the planting of timber might eventually 

 produce. Then there is, as Mr Munro Ferguson has said, no 

 great inducement to the private landlord to do very much in the 

 way of forestry, especially as there is no guarantee that his 

 successors might take the same view of the matter as he does, 

 and I think there that Mr Muo.ro Ferguson hit the right nail on 

 the head when he said that, that being so, the State ought to 

 take up this matter. There again our difficulty is that we have 

 got no great State forests which we can use for educational pur- 

 poses to quite the same extent as they do the forests of Germany 

 and France. Of course we have got forests under the care of the 

 Office of Woods and Forests. The two principal ones are the 

 New Forest and the Forest of Dean. With regard to the New 

 Forest, I am afraid it is hopeless to attempt to do anything there 

 in the way of commercial planting, because if there is one thing 

 the people have set their hearts on, it is that the New Forest 

 shall be a national playground; and whenever the slightest 

 enclosure takes place there for the purpose of growing timber, 

 there is an outcry, and the Treasury and Woods and Forests have 

 given it up as a bad job. There is the Forest of Dean, which, as 

 you know, is a very large area, though nothing like the size of the 

 New Forest, where there is not the same claim on the part of 



