THE TEAK REGION. 215 



were not in a useful state to meet the ordinary require- 

 ments of the country. 



Our treatment of this question of the teak forests 

 is a good example of the difficulties in Indian adminis- 

 tration which arise from the absence of accurate infor- 

 mation on the real requirements of the country, and 

 the obstacles in the way of reconciling the conditions 

 of a low and almost stationary stage of society with 

 nineteenth-century " progress," and high-pressure civili- 

 sation. In the cry for great timbers for our railways 

 we totally forgot, or neglected, the demand of the 

 masses of the population for small timber for their 

 houses and many other purposes. We shut up every 

 acre of the teak-produciug country we could, and 

 referred them to inferior sorts of wood, all the best 

 species besides teak having been tabooed along with 

 it. The other species of timber, when used young, 

 mostly decay in a year or two in an Indian climate ; 

 and so the people were put to a vast unnecessary 

 expenditure of labour in renewals, while we strove, 

 by pruning and preserving, to make large timber grow 

 out of the scrubby coppice wood which had before 

 supplied their wants ; and, as it proved, strove entirely 

 in vain. This pollarded teak will not grow straight and 

 large, prune we never so wisely. It will grow well 

 to a certain size, the size the natives require it, but 

 after that it decays and twists into every variety 

 of tortuous shape. What we should have done was 

 to reserve the best forests for timber purposes proper, 

 and apply to the rest — the vastly greater part of them — 

 only such measures as would ensure the best and 

 quickest production of coppice wood for the require- 

 ments of the people. It has been said that they should 



