6 UTILITY OF FORESTS TO A NATION 



And the war has demonstrated that it is an economic 

 factor of undeniable importance to Great Britain. 



Broadly speaking, the utility of the forest to the 

 Nation may be grouped under two main heads 

 direct utility and indirect utility. 



The direct utility of the forest is dependent upon 

 the produce which it yields, the capital it represents, 

 and the amount of labour it employs. For our 

 purposes the chief produce of the forest is timber 

 and pit wood, followed by wood pulp, packing-case 

 wood, wood used for turnery purposes, bobbins, and 

 so on. But the forest may also yield a variety of 

 minor or secondary produce, such as pitch, tar, oil 

 of turpentine at home, and caoutchouc, gutta-percha, 

 rosin, gums, dyes, lac, etc., in other parts of the Em- 

 pire, of which between 14,000,000 and 15,000,000 

 sterling were imported into this country in 1913. 

 Of the chief products, timber and pit wood, the war 

 has brought home to us our almost entire dependence 

 on imports for our supplies. It has also demon- 

 strated that, in spite of all the substitutes which have 

 replaced wood in construction and other industries, 

 wood is as necessary to us in this twentieth century 

 as it has ever been in past history if not more so. 

 For one thing, new industries consuming wood have 

 arisen, e.g. the wood-pulp trade and, a newer one, the 

 aeroplane industry. The total value of the forest 

 produce used in the industries of Europe alone in 

 1913 was probably somewhere between 230,000,000 

 and 240,000,000. The war has also proved, as no 

 war has ever done before, that a nation cannot with 

 safety depend entirely on imports for its timber, 



