248 THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH FORESTRY 



It would appear that tlie more highly a country is 

 developed the greater the natural tendency for private 

 woods to take the place of those owned by the State. 

 That is to say, the country becomes in course of time so 

 utilised, that private ownership of small blocks is a much 

 more prominent feature than State ownership of large 

 undivided areas. This tendency is the more marked in 

 densely populated countries, in which the competition for 

 land increases, and the higher value put upon it induces 

 the owner, whether the State or the individual, to turn 

 this fact to account by renting or selling the more fertile 

 part to those able to pay the highest price. In this way 

 all large blocks of land, whether forest or v/aste, are 

 gradually broken up, and the longer the process has been 

 going on the more difficult it is to find large areas of any 

 one type of land in the hands of one owner. 



In many cases, however, the natural tendency to split 

 up land has been retarded or prevented, and notably so in 

 the case of forests. Only in Russia, Sweden, Norway, etc., 

 in which the forests may be considered as virgin waste, is 

 it found that State-owned forests predominate in a purely 

 natural or spontaneous form. In nearly all other European 

 countries the percentage of State-owned woods seldom 

 exceeds 30 per cent, of the total, and is then only main- 

 tained by an energetic process of conservation, and resist- 

 ance to encroachments which has been brought about by 

 strong measures. In mountain districts physical reasons 

 exist, as already stated, for the restriction of other forms 

 of industry, but in the lowlands it is invariably found 

 that the division of land has proceeded at a more or less 

 rapid rate, and this has undoubtedly tended to throw 

 woodlands into the hands of small estate-owners, and to 

 restrict them to inferior patches of soil unsuitable for 

 other crops. 



But although large areas of woods have passed out of the 



