PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS, 139 
I think we should do what we can to consider how the object 
can be attained, and, if we are satisfied that we are advancing a 
solution which may last for a century, or even a solution which 
tends to diminish the evil to any great extent, we should press 
it with all the strength of our united energy. 
My own impression is that, while in the past we have asked 
the powers that be to establish a school for forestry and an 
experimental area, we have never pressed home the point that, 
in a matter of such national importance, the State itself should 
be ¢he one to lend every assistance and encouragement to set 
going work of the kind I have alluded to. So far as I am 
aware, the State has never yet done a hand’s turn in the 
direction of encouraging and assisting in the extension of tree- 
culture in Great Britain, except in so far as its management of 
Crown Lands goes. In this, its action is equivalent only to 
that of an individual preserving or advancing his own interests, 
and it cannot be termed national encouragement. 
I shrink from estimating how many acres of land there are 
at present in our country which have a valuation of from ts. to 
3S. per acre for grazing purposes, and yet which are not too 
rocky, too steep, or at too high an elevation to prevent their 
producing a crop of larch worth, at least, £90 an acre in 
seventy or eighty years. But while I shrink from estimating 
the quantity of land available, I am prepared to assert and 
prove that even a small area, such as 20,000 acres of such 
land, under suitable timber-crop, will maintain a great many 
more families in comfort than they will as a grazing area. 
Under timber they will, in course of time, increase the assessable 
value of the locality, and so benefit the parish, the district, the 
county and the State from the view of taxable capacity; and 
they will prove as remunerative to the landowner at the close 
of the cycle as the annual grazing value #, and it is a big 7% 
the capital with which to face the initial outlay can be obtained 
at the same cheap rate, as regards interest and repayment, as 
capital is already advanced at by the State for several other 
purposes. 
You will observe that I put the onus of making such a 
scheme “work” upon the landowner and not upon the State. 
I do this because, owing to windfalls and other unforeseen 
accidents, there is but a small margin, and also because I am 
dealing with a matter in which the man who sows cannot expect 
