yS TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



lively, and lively in the right sense if I may say so. I think your 

 own address has been extremely interesting, and various subjects 

 have been touched on by others in an interesting manner. 



" I must say I have great sympathy with the views which 

 Mr Spiers has just expressed, and on the subject of what our 

 attitude at the present time should be as a Society, I think 

 probably there is a middle course between the two views which 

 have been suggested by Mr Sutherland on the one side and Sir 

 John Stirling-Maxwell on the other. We certainly cannot expect 

 at the present time to be getting large Government grants — that is 

 out of the question just now. As Mr Sutherland said, we have to 

 concentrate our attention on winning the war, and our finances 

 have to be available for that first of all, but at the same time I 

 think there is a great deal to be said for thinking out the problems 

 that are ahead of us. We are all quite convinced of this, that 

 after this war we are bound to be faced with some very stiff 

 problems indeed, almost as stiff as those that are facing us 

 to-day, and I think that we ought to be preparing for these, and 

 among other things that we should be doing is to be thinking 

 out schemes by which employment will be provided after the 

 war. Now, I happen to have a little experience of the prepara- 

 tion of public schemes presented for Government considera- 

 tion, and I know that in all such schemes, especially those 

 affecting land, the time that it takes to get a scheme in 

 working order after all interests have been considered is very 

 great, and if we wait till the end of the war before these schemes 

 are presented for consideration, a great deal of suffering will be 

 felt before the schemes actually come into operation. There- 

 fore I think that those of us, especially those of us who are 

 above military age and who may possibly have some spare 

 time, among other calls, to think out these problems — we should 

 be devising something, and I do not think we should be too 

 dependent on Government officials. They are very busy many 

 of them just now, and after all I think there is a great deal to be 

 said for trying to stand on our own feet in these matters. We 

 make more progress if we try to do things ourselves than if we 

 are always looking round for other men to do them. I think 

 we have been guilty in the past as a Society in that way. This 

 Society can think these things out well, because they involve 

 the question of how to deal with certain classes of land, and the 

 first person we have to consider is the landowner, with whom 



