MEN OF THE TREES 



form my hearers that I was not responsible for the 

 advertised title of my lecture. Although certain recom- 

 mendations had been made to Government, the Foreign 

 Policy was not at that time known. Already there had 

 been seventeen thousand applications for a possible forty 

 or fifty posts. The first two rows in the lecture hall 

 consisted of Staff Officers. Behind them were other of- 

 ficers of all ranks, perhaps as many as forty or fifty in 

 number. Non-commissioned officers and men completed 

 the interested gathering. They had evidently come in 

 search of a short cut to the simple life. I explained the 

 qualifications of a Forestry Officer could not be acquired 

 without arduous training, although many thought that 

 all that it was necessary to do was to put on a tweed 

 jacket, smoke a calabash pipe, sit on a log in the forest 

 and watch the trees grow. I told them that the training 

 of a Forester was a long and difficult process, demanding 

 many years of concentrated work. First of all, he had 

 to take honors in a Science Trip, then on the top of that 

 it took two years to collect a Diploma in Forestry. After 

 that, practical work had to be done for at least from one 

 to two years and a probation period would have to be 

 served. It was not to the would-be Forest Officers that 

 I had come to talk that afternoon, but to those who had 

 thought of taking up small holdings. I wanted to show 

 them how they could turn a precarious existence into a 

 living by working during the winter months in Govern- 

 ment Forest Plantations and thus supplement anything 

 that they might glean from their holding. I had to break 



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