AFFORESTATION IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND. 149 



6,000,000 acres represent quite an irrational proportion of the 

 remainiiig land less suitable for agricultural occupation than 

 for forestry. And as most of the hill land below looo to 1200 

 feet forms winter pasture for sheep stocks, if that be taken for 

 atforestation the whole grazing industry will become dislocated, 

 and the whole of the Highland sheep-farmers will be in a state 

 of political revolt. 



But even more amazing than the extent of land considered 

 suitable for profitable planting is the manner in which it is pro- 

 posed to be acquired. No attempt is to be made to assist and 

 encourage landowners willing to plant, and this is a very weak 

 point in the scheme ; because, although under existing conditions 

 and laivs the State is the only landowner that can afford to 

 create large compact blocks of woodland without desiring quick 

 returns, yet a vast State monopoly of timber-growing can only 

 be justified after the failure of fair attempts at assisting and 

 encouraging private landowners by means of money loans and 

 legislative amendments {e.g., as to settled estates, law of entail, 

 rating and valuation, succession and estate duty, lands improve- 

 ment, railway fires, damage by ground game, railway and road 

 ■ charges, and various other matters affecting land, crops and 

 finance). Under the existing conditions, my own personal 

 opinion (stated on page 93 of vol. i. of The Forester, in 1905) 

 coincides with that expressed by the Commission, and is as 

 follows : — 



The necessity for State assistance is a chronic drawback to planting for 

 profit. Early in the last century this was just as much the case as it now is. 

 Even then, although all the timber, bark, and small material from the copse- 

 woods was easily sold at good prices, want of funds prevented extensive 

 planting of waste lands. "Such lands, it must be owned, are sufficiently 

 abundant, but the great expense and slow returns of planting are inconvenient 

 to the majority of land proprietors. . . . The expense of planting is immediate 

 and certain, the profit distant and precarious" {Quarterly Reviezv, 1813, vol. 

 X. p. 9.) 



This is precisely what the recent Committee on Forestry, 1902, has 

 reiterated. The main drawback to planting is, and has always been, and 

 probably always will be, want of funds ; all the other obstacles can far more 

 easily be removed. 



But even if substantial inducements could be ofifered by Government 

 to private landowners, it w^ould not necessarily follow that the plantations 

 thereafter formed would be managed upon more business-like principles than 

 are the existing woods and plantations The State is the only possible 

 landowner that can be expected to create large compact blocks of woodlands 

 in the United Kingdom, to be managed on silvicullural principles, with the 



