WTTEN AFFORESTATION COMES. I 25 



great expectations from the financial side of this movement 

 will be the objects of my short paper. 



I do not mean to waste time discussing the social aspects 

 of afforestation. There can be no finer peasantry than is 

 made up by those who work amongst the woods, and carefully 

 planned woodlands should be an aid rather than a hindrance 

 to both farming and sport. Neither will I stay to discuss 

 the climatic influences of a well-wooded country where moisture 

 is more regular and winds are stayed in their intensity. 

 Rather would I discuss the probable financial profit of 

 growing timber for our own uses, and a life-time spent in 

 the timber trade ought to fit me to some extent to undertake 

 this task. Here I may say that I have no intention of 

 weaving a web of airy statistics to prove that timber growing 

 upon the shoulders of certain hills or up the sides of certain 

 glens, or even upon some low haughlands, will pay better than 

 grouse or sheep or oats or potatoes. Were I a promoter of a 

 timber lands company, I could easily, by hunting up statistics 

 gleaned from available sources, prove all that, at least to my 

 own satisfaction. But for wood grown on the grand scale 

 that it is soon likely to be ; with, say sixty years hence, a supply 

 ready for the markets, and which must be marketed, possibly 

 ten times larger than that available at present, a totally new 

 state of matters will have arisen. Suffice it to say, there 

 will always be a market in this country for all the timber 

 that can possibly be grown, and provided the felling and 

 marketing charges can be kept within reasonable limits, and 

 a class of timber suitable for the local demands produced, 

 then with or without a tax on imported produce the crop of 

 timber will be a paying one, but we must never expect our 

 trees when grown to have " trunks of gold and limbs of silver." 



I have mentioned, as the first of the considerations that 

 have brought to the front the subject of State afforestation, 

 the high price to which wood has now risen in this country. 

 That wood of all kinds is higher at the present moment than 

 it has been for some years is undoubtedly true, that even 

 to-day it is showing a tendency to rise still higher is also 

 true, but that there is cause to fear anything approaching 

 to a timber famine, I for one do not for one moment believe. 

 The late Mr Lewis Miller was, in our locality, the great 

 prophet of a famine in timber. I was never a believer in 



