FORESTS. 43 



ready to part with at a moment's notice (a circumstance owing 

 to the fact of the heavy mortgage debts which encumber our 

 land), but would consider their estates as a home for them- 

 selves, their children, and their children's children; then 

 it is not only possible, but certain, that a proper attention 

 would be paid to the culture of our forests. For experience 

 has sufficiently proved that this very circumstance of regard- 

 ing estates in the mere light of marketable chattels, has 

 been the greatest cause of destroying the private woods in 

 Sweden." 



But after all, private forests are only capital, which the 

 holder has a right to make the most of, and it is a question 

 with a man, when he invests his capital in the purchase of a 

 forest, which will give him the best return for that capital, to 

 let it lie in the forest under a hundred years' circulation, or 

 whether he cuts down all his forest at once, and invests the 

 produce of the timber at interest in other ways. 



According to Agardth, if the forest is divided into 120 

 years' circulation, it gives one-one-hundred-and-twentieth in- 

 come every year, or five-sixths per cent., and when we take 

 from that the rent on the capital which is required to carry 

 out the system, it will perhaps hardly give two-thirds per cent. 

 This is little more than what a common meadow will 

 return. 



Still it appears to me that if I chose to cut down all my 

 forests, common prudence would dictate the expediency 

 of planting them again, as the forest laud will be fit 

 for little else. Moreover, in every forest there must be 

 many trees not worth cutting down, and if these were allowed 

 to stand, they would soon double their value, for at this 

 very time, if a tree in the Wermland forests of twenty years' 

 growth (twenty feet long), which measures ten inches 

 across the little end, is allowed to stand ten years longer, its 

 value will be double what it is now. In fact, no prudent 

 forest owner would ever fell a tree until it measured twelve 

 inches across the small end. 



But it eeems that the mismanagement of the forests in 

 many instances proceeds as much from laziness as from care- 



