262 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
2. What encouragement has the State hitherto given towards 
the Planting of Waste Land for Profit?—The only answer to 
this is—None at all. Provisions have been framed under the 
“Settled Land” and other Acts for permitting trustees to grant 
money for planting, but no State-encouragement whatever has 
yet been given; and, in fact, the reverse is the case, owing to 
the abolition of the timber-import duties. In 1848, some of the 
preferential duties on foreign timber were removed; in 1851, 
further similar changes were made; and in 1866, Mr Gladstone 
“swept away the last of the old vexatious duties on timber,” 
when “the last tax on raw material vanished with the repeal of 
the duty on timber” (Morley’s Zzfe of Gladstone, 1903, vol. ii. 
pp. 68 and 200). Neither at these times, nor subsequently, was 
any sort of compensation given to landowners for such virtual 
depreciation in the value of their planting investments, previously 
made, and of a permanent nature not capable of being recon- 
verted into money and otherwise invested; and, since then, 
legislation affecting rates and taxes, estate and succession duties, 
etc., has added to existing burdens, in place of offering encourag- 
ment to the planting of waste lands. 
The real fact of the matter is that the nation is almost apathetic 
about timber. Improved communications by land and water, 
iron steamships and railways, and free imports have obliterated 
the memory of what a burning question the subject of timber 
long was in Britain. It was never a party question; for two 
hundred years it touched the vital interests-of the nation too 
closely for that; and now, because it is non-party and non- 
political, it is almost absolutely neglected. And the direct 
consequence of this is that, even if large landowners had funds 
and desired to plant extensively (though few of them have, 
unless they also own rich estates or coal-mines, etc., ‘because 
planting investments are usually unremunerative for about thirty 
to forty years), far from Government holding out any induce- 
ments to encourage them in this respect, the growing of timber 
is hampered with various restrictions that might easily be 
remedied by legislation. Yet the Houses of Parliament, the 
two great representative bodies of landowners in the United 
Kingdom, have never thought it worth while to compel 
Government, as they might do any time they liked, to give 
some sort of State-aid, or to relieve timber-growing of any of 
the financial disabilities under which this branch of rural 
