FORESTRY IN THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. 1 55 



were not we should all be very much worse off. He may find 

 it difficult to believe that considerable sums of money do not 

 annually leave this country for the purchase of timber or any- 

 thing else, but nevertheless the fact is so. If all nations were 

 to live up to his ideal of self-supporting communities, each 

 refusing to export raw material, the population of these islands 

 would be perhaps one-tenth of what it is to-day, and the 

 problem of afforestation would wear a very different aspect. 

 We cannot follow Mr Stebbing through, what seems to us, the 

 morass of economic fallacies in which he embeds his arguments, 

 but he appears to believe that if a purchaser is not a producer of 

 a certain article he has no control over the price of that article, 

 and that he is at the mercy of " a monopoly " (p. 109), although 

 Mr Stebbing must have bought oranges, bananas, tea, and 

 many other exotic commodities at very low prices before the 

 war, and will do so again, we assure him, before many years are 

 over: he is satisfied that "a number of industries in the absence 

 of their chief material, wood, would come to an end," including, 

 we gather, the construction of railways, tramcars, omnibuses, 

 carriages, and motor cars — although he must know that the 

 use of any particular material for a purpose depends upon its 

 comparative accessibility and cheapness, and that it is quite 

 possible yet to substitute other materials for timber, as in the 

 past timber houses gave way largely to brick, and wooden ships 

 to iron and steel. 



We are glad to find ourselves in agreement with Mr Stebbing 

 when he says that if the British people are serious in their 

 attitude towards the League of Nations "we can no longer 

 appeal for the support of the public in this afforestation matter, 

 giving as our main argument the national safety point of view." 

 We regret all the more his facile taunts cast at a defeated 

 enemy; "these barbarians" (p. 95) should be made to pay 

 " part of the indemnity ... in timber, and timber calculated 

 at the prices in force at the outbreak of war" (p. 91): but 

 perhaps Mr Stebbing's economic misconceptions prevent him 

 from appreciating the dishonesty of such a transaction, although 

 the barbarian of tradition might well shrink from it. However, 

 these patriotic sentiments, even several times repeated, do not 

 affect the main economic argument to which we will return in 

 concluding our notice. 



The case for afforestation is not, we venture to suggest, to 



VOL. XXXIII. PART II. M 



