410 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



marsh, of neglected land yielding a miserable rent as sheep- 

 walks, or else only enlivening the landscape with Goldsmith's 

 " improfitably gay " furze bushes ; and there are square miles 

 and miles of bare hillside and hilltops — more particularly in 

 Scotland — which would bear larch and spruce and pine, it 

 may be beech and oak, all of which yield valuable and 

 needed timber— precisely the type of timber, says the 

 Forestry Committee, that we are in want of — staring us 

 reproachfully in the face in their nakedness, ' ' One- fourth 

 of our 12,000,000 acres of waste land, and our 12,500,000 

 acres of mountain and heath land used for light grazing," 

 says Sir W. Schlich, "if put under forest, would produce 

 all the timber now imported, which can be grown in 

 Britain, that is to say, 95% of the total." And for 

 decades and decades nobody has appeared to trouble 

 about this inexcusable waste. To any one acquainted 

 with the painstaking utiUsation of mountain land by 

 our Continental neighbours it is apparent at first glance. 

 And there is no excuse for it, except it be our native 

 indisposition to take trouble to which necessity or the 

 prospect of immediate substantial gain does not impel us. 

 What timber might have been grown upon those bare 

 mountain sides ! What employment might have been 

 given in the woods to the local population ! How many 

 more healthy homesteads might have been set up ! What 

 welcome shelter against destructive winds might have 

 been given to inland plains and valleys ! And as if such 

 neglect were not enough to weigh upon our consciences, 

 whatever forests there are — it now turns out, more speci- 

 fically under the recent inquiry by the Forestry Committee 

 — have been disgracefully mismanaged and half ruined, 

 left to decay because, as Lord Selborne has well put it in 

 his evidence before the Committee just named, " landlords 

 prefer rabbits to trees." There we have one cause of this 

 long and shameful neglect frankly confessed ! We have 

 fancied ourselves so rich, sitting like Babylon of old " a 

 queen " amid nations, that we have come to value 

 " ruffles " of luxury more than the " shirt " of necessity, 

 sport more than the production of food, and than the 



