TRAINING IN SYLVICULTURE. 25 
demand for them is at all commensurate with our present require- 
ments. Moreover, our object should be far wider than that of 
effecting some improvement over some proportion of existing 
British woodlands, which is all that can at best be achieved by 
detached or unsystematic effort. Our purpose, as it affects the 
United Kingdom, becomes clear when it is realised that the most 
obvious way to arrest rural depopulation in these islands is not 
only to make our private woodlands remunerative, but to afforest 
several million acres of waste and rough pasture, thus giving 
employment to a great body of people through sylvicultural 
operations and the great subsidiary industries of which the raw 
material is timber. 
Something may doubtless be done in certain districts to provide 
for a denser population through the development of intensive 
cultivation on small holdings, but such areas are relatively 
minute and the population affected comparatively small; and 
while the State can achieve comparatively little in the agricultural 
sphere, save by educational methods, it alone is the creative 
agency for adequate afforestation. 
Yet if we are to have real commercial sylviculture, the first 
requirement is the trained forester, and our Government, as in 
other civilised States, should, before all things, take the essential 
step of providing for the training of our foresters. The only 
answer to the artistic or philanthropic tree-planters, whose cries 
are worthy of any flock of gulls, is to make a practical beginning 
with the foundation stone of knowledge. The only advice to be 
offered, whether by the expert with his infallible thesis, or by the 
landowner with his unfailing disappointments, is that a wider 
diffusion of specialised knowledge must precede any normal or 
abnormal development or expansion of the forest area. 
The forest school, with its auxiliaries, has been the ideal of 
every British sylviculturist who chanced to appear in the 
nineteenth century; and, with the opening of the twentieth, 
material for an educational policy was sifted, collected, and laid 
down by a Departmental Committee in rgoz. 
The proposals then made have, a few cranks apart, secured 
the adhesion of the expert and of such lay opinion as was worth 
having. Upon our administrative departments, it is true, the 
report fell flat; within those august precincts it remained so 
entirely unknown that at the opening of this session one of the 
Cabinet proposed to “ inquire” again into Forestry, coupling with 
