AFFORESTATION IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND. I 45 



waste lands with timber is quite a different matter from merely 

 improving the management of great natural forests. To create 

 new woodlands on bare, impoverished, and often water-logged 

 land involves a great capital outlay, with all the risks and 

 disappointments attendant on a vast scheme of creating 

 supplies of raw material for the establishment of new industries 

 in the British Isles. And if German results be appealed to 

 for guidance in this particular business, then it is not to Saxony 

 that one should look, but to Prussia, which has much greater 

 resemblance to, Britain so far as regards its northern climate, 

 its partial sea-board, and its great stretches of poor moor and 

 heatherland, with a scanty population — although Prussia, too, 

 has large areas of splendid spruce forests (Harz) and rich oak 

 and beech (Soiling, Ems, Weser, etc.). During the four 

 quinquennial periods from 1877 to 1896 the average net income 

 per acre per annum for the Prussian State forests was 37, 4-1, 

 4*9, and 5-1 shillings ; and though it is larger now than then, it 

 does not necessarily follow that British plantations on waste 

 lands and poor grazing tracts will either equal or surpass in 

 net income the profit earned in Prussia from twelve to seventeen 

 years ago. But as the reclamation and planting of waste land 

 has been going on in Prussia continuously for over fifty-five 

 years, it would have been of special value to have had definite 

 and unprejudiced evidence as to the actual material and 

 monetary results now accruing from these plantations. 



So far as their Report shows, the Royal Commission does not 

 appear to have attempted to obtain any information on this 

 most important point. Certain data referring to afforestation 

 and planting, I can give you now, however, which will of 

 themselves prove most emphatically that the physical and 

 economic conditions throughout the waste-land tracts of 

 Prussia are entirely different from those obtaining in our 

 waste-land areas and poor pastures. Between ist October 

 1904 and 30th September 1907, the Prussian State Forest 

 Department acquired by purchase 46,346 acres of waste land, 

 and planted 33,998 acres with timber-trees of various kinds, 

 mostly conifers, at an average cost of 48s. per acre. But, 

 besides that, village communes and corporations, and other 

 bodies have likewise been carrying out planting operations, 

 towards the expenditure on which the State also makes a 

 partial contribution. The Prussian Forest Department, to 



