56 



Canadian Forestry Journal, February, 1919 



AN IMPERIAL FOREST POLICY 



By Sir John Stirling Maxrvcll, 

 Glasgorv, Scotland. 



Give Canadian Woods an Equal Chance by 



Taxing Baltic Imports — British Financial 



Aid for Forest Protection? 



Foresight is not the strong point of demo- 

 cracy. Few statesmen look beyond their own 

 generation, many not beyond the next election. 

 Those who do have to face the enmity of the 

 party machine, which in the Old Country and 

 no doubt also in Canada is a machine devoted 

 to the capture of votes. Forestry, which de- 

 mands long views and offers no immediate 

 benefit to the electors, has thus suffered in every 

 democratic country except France where it was 

 f)laced on a sound footing more than a century 

 before the revolution by the celebrated ordin- 

 ance drawn up by Colbert for Louis XIV. 



Britain is still waitmg for its Colbert. For 

 many years before the war forestry had been 

 neglected by successive British Governments 

 and our timber supplies completely left to chance 

 in the belief that cheap transport would bring 

 so much as was required from overseas. The 

 question of timber as an element in national 

 defence had not been considered at all. The 

 war brought a rude awakening. A Committee 

 which has enquired into the matter reports that 



£37,000,000 sterling was wasted during the first 

 two years of war in increased freight and insur- 

 ance and lost cargoes of imported timber — a 

 sum which could have been saved if means had 

 been devised earlier to utilise the woodland 

 resources of the British Isles a sum more than 

 sufficient to have reconstituted the woods after 

 the war and increased them to the extent that 

 national safety demands. The home reserves 

 of growing timber, though small indeed when 

 judged by Canadian standards, were large 

 compared to the area under wood. Felling had 

 been discouraged since neglect and lack of or- 

 ganisation had rendered British woods unprofit- 

 able. The proportion of mature timber was thus 

 much larger than is usual in European forests, 

 which, except in Russia, are worked on a 

 regular rotation and contain timber of all ages. 

 When, under compulsion of the German sub- 

 marine, the British woods began to be seriously 

 attacked in the third year of the war, want of 

 labour was the main difficulty and the needs of 

 the war could not have been met without the 



Photo bv H. C. Weaver, Atlas, Sask. 

 PLANTING TREES ON THE PRAIRIE. 

 This shows what commendable results were secured by a young Saskatchewan farmer. 

 Note the heavy growth of trees surrounding the school building in the background. 



