INTRODUCTION 



with the little efforts that have been made by 

 private landowners, is the sum total of our 

 planting operations. There are, perhaps, no 

 exact statistics of the total quantity of stand- 

 ing timber that we possess, but according to 

 the most reliable estimates about 3,000,000 

 acres out of a total of 77,000,000 acres are 

 wooded, and the value of this may be roughly 

 conjectured as about 33,000,000. Now, 

 previous to the war our annual imports 

 amounted to fully 45,000,000, or, in other 

 words, the total value of standing timber in 

 the British Isles is less than has been yearly 

 spent on purchasing that commodity from 

 abroad. Assuming that the war had con- 

 tinued for another two years with the restricted 

 imports, there would have been little or no 

 timber left standing in this country. This 

 is a wrong state of matters, that can only 

 be put right by the Government, at once, 

 planting up at least a million acres of land 

 during the next twenty-five years. 



It is most unfortunate that the tendency of 

 the war has been to seriously check planting 



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