EROSION AND AFFORESTATION ROYAL COMMISSION REPORT. 1 89 



With a changed national sentiment, however, with proper 

 professional training, and a better and fuller conception of the 

 true aims and objects of forestry, it is not likely that the 

 mistakes and errors of the past century will be repeated in the 

 future. Still it is well to remember, when summing up what has 

 been done for forestry by the State and by the private owner 

 respectively, that the really good and successful work must be 

 placed almost entirely to the credit of the latter. 



The Suggested Timber Famine, 



As far back as 1830, we find writers on forestry matters 

 deploring the reckless methods of exploitation employed in 

 America and Northern Europe, and prophesying an almost 

 immediate timber famine. One Cruickshank, who was forester 

 to the then Earl of Fife, and who published, about the year 1828, 

 a useful book on planting, wrote in this strain. He pointed out 

 that we were then importing timber to the value of about one 

 and a half million pounds sterling. The natural forests were 

 being destroyed, and he considered that we were then nearing 

 a shortage, if not a famine, in timber. Many things have 

 happened since then, and one can only smile when one realises 

 how far this man's views have been falsified. Nevertheless, if 

 planting on an extensive scale had been carried out eighty 

 years ago, as he suggested, though we might not now have 

 had extensive forests of first - class timber, we certainly 

 might have had a foundation to work from, which would have 

 much simplified the present-day task of afforestation. At fairly 

 regular intervals throughout the whole of last century, various 

 writers (some interested, some disinterested) wrote in a similar 

 strain about a timber famine, but people get callous when they 

 hear the same story repeated again and again, without anything 

 very dreadful happening; and until quite recently, very little 

 attention has been paid to what many considered to be a question 

 of merely academic interest. The value of our annual imports 

 of timber, etc., now considerably exceeds ^30,000,000 sterling. 

 We certainly have not yet reached the famine stage, but prices 

 are steadily rising, while the quality is as steadily going down. 



All the best natural stands of coniferous timber in accessible 

 parts, both in Northern Europe and America, are being swept 

 away ; and we have now reached the stage when timber 



