THE FOREST RESOURCES OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. 5 



against an expenditure of ;^58,402, a net loss of ;j^25,9ii. 

 They were not to suppose that he was casting any blame on 

 the Commissioners, who had administered the woodlands in 

 the past according to the instructions of Parliament — namely, 

 as a mixture of pleasure ground, common grazing, and amateur 

 forestry. He was glad to recognise that since Mr Stafford 

 Howard became Senior Commissioner he had been successful 

 in persuading the Treasury to initiate a better system, the first 

 fruits of which was the purchase of 13,000 acres in Argyllshire 

 as a State Forest. A comparison with the German forests 

 showed that if British forest management were as successful 

 as German, the 3,000,000 acres of woodland in these islands, 

 instead of costing enormous sums to maintain, should return 

 an annual net profit of a round million, or 6s. 8d. an acre. 



Climatic Conditions. 



The most common objection to forestry enterprise in the 

 United Kingdom was founded upon the score of climate. " Oh," 

 it was said, " you need not try to grow trees for profit in Britain ; 

 our storms are far too violent and frequent." There was a 

 perfectly satisfactory answer to that. In the first place, there 

 was no evidence that our climate was more stormy than it was 

 when the Romans landed here nineteen hundred years ago, and 

 found the whole island covered with dense primeval forest up 

 to the 1500 feet level. Secondly, atmospheric disturbance was 

 not more violent or frequent with us than in the United States, 

 Canada, Scandinavia, and other lands. It was quite true that 

 our proportion of exposed seaboard, where profitable planting 

 was out of the question, was excessive, but all our inland and 

 mountainous regions were no more exposed to the wind than 

 those of other countries. It was also true that British wood- 

 lands, such as they were, suffered more from wind damage 

 than Continental forests did, not because our gales were more 

 frequent, but because our woods were almost invariably laid 

 out in small blocks or in belts, with a view to game, ornament, 

 or shelter, and because we had got into the practice of over- 

 thinning them, encouraging heavy, branchy heads, which 

 invited calamity. A thousand contiguous acres of wood grown 

 in close canopy would successfully resist a gale that would work 

 havoc in 1000 acres scattered over an estate of 10,000 acres. 



