EROSION AND AFFORESTATION ROYAL COMMISSION REPORT. 1 95 



the city-bred man would be little able to " rough-it " under such 

 conditions. 



It is the present custom on many wooded estates, where exten- 

 sive planting is done year after year, to employ extra hands during 

 the planting season. These extra hands are drawn of necessity 

 from the temporarily unemployed. The writer of this note has 

 employed casual labour of this sort for several successive seasons 

 in two widely diflferent parts of Scotland, and the results in both 

 cases were quite satisfactory. In one case the men were drawn 

 from a small manufacturing town, but in both cases they had 

 had a rural training. They had never used the actual tools 

 required for planting, but they had used similar ones, and with a 

 week's training and a little extra supervision, they did quite 

 good work when stiffened, as it were, by the regular estate 

 hands. The extra men went back to their ordinary occupations 

 again at the end of the planting season. There were no housing 

 difficulties in these cases, for the men could walk to their own 

 homes, or find quarters in the houses of the permanent estate men. 



The case would be rather different with city-bred men, and 

 only from the best types of the city unemployed could one hope 

 to draw a suitable class of workers ; but even the best of them 

 would need far more training and supervision than country- 

 bred men. If due allowance were made, however, for the extra 

 cost which would be incurred by the employment of such men, 

 there seems no reason why they might not be tried in certain 

 localities at any rate. And in any case, if work were thus given 

 during the winter months to men in rural districts who otherwise 

 could find no employment, the present tendency for such men to 

 flock to the towns would be very much checked, and in the long 

 run the effect must be to improve the congested condition of 

 the labour market in the large cities. 



Finance. 



The financial proposals of the Royal Commission have been 

 subjected to a great deal of adverse criticism ; but probably 

 this is because they have been, to a certain extent, mis- 

 understood. The figures of the Commissioners' Report have 

 obviously been intended to give a general indication of what 

 the financial outcome might reasonably be expected to be, and 

 must not be regarded as absolutely correct in every detail and 



