124 TKANSACTIONS OF KOYAL SCOTTISH AKHORICUI.TUKAL SOCIETY. 



That I would point out to you is not only an individual loss, it 

 is also a national loss. We are not using our capital to increase 

 the wealth of the country. We are not really producing 

 anything ; we are living upon our capital, and in that way 

 depleting the wealth of the country, and using up the sources of 

 the future development which we hope to see ; and, further, we 

 are not utilising the same amount of labour that we might do 

 with regard to many of those waste places. 



" From those two points of view I think we may look forward to 

 an increase of our forest area which will certainly not be in any 

 way detrimental to the agricultural interest. Not only will it not 

 be detrimental, but it will be positively helpful, particularly to the 

 outlying districts, in which this help will be greater than in those 

 which are now more closely occupied. The great beauty of the 

 relations which may exist, and I hope will exist, in this country 

 between agriculture and forestry is the way in which the one 

 will dovetail into the other, and the way in which the labour 

 which is now not fully occupied upon agricultural land can be 

 used profitably in the forest, and for which good wages can be 

 paid. I refer particularly to the much vexed question that has 

 been put forward before us so frequently, the question of small 

 holdings. To my way of thinking forestry is the one way of 

 solving this difficulty. You cannot put small holdings down in 

 the country, in any portion of it with which I am acquainted, 

 unless they are of such a size that they can no longer be called 

 small, or, on the other hand, unless you provide labour to eke 

 out the products of the holdings themselves. Now in this way 

 forestry comes to our help. We can have, and would be 

 glad to have, a great multiplication of these small holdings, 

 because we (I am speaking now as a forester), in the first place, 

 require the labour of the occupants, and they, on the other hand, 

 require the wages which we give them. 



" I can give you a personal experience with regard to this. I 

 have a certain amount of land which is some distance from the 

 sources of supply of labour. I tried in every way to get labourers 

 to walk for two or two and a half miles to work for me in the 

 woods. They did not like doing it, especially in the winter time, 

 and I did not like it either, because they wasted half the day coming 

 and going. I took a farm which happened to fall vacant — it was 

 not a big one — and I split it and made it into two small holdings of 

 about lo acres each, crofts as we call them, though we have no 



