430 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



that famed " British oak," of the quahty of which England 

 had a right to be proud. Hand-to-mouth management 

 of entailed estates, and ignorance of the principles of forestry, 

 coupled with the sportman's insouciance for what does not 

 concern his sport, have been the cause of its decline. In 

 Lord Selborne's words, given in evidence before the Forestry 

 Committee, our landlords " prefer rabbits to trees." 



Take the two things together, absolute waste and bad 

 forestry, and you arrive at a total of national loss which 

 is appalling. The war has led us to find out our misdeeds. 

 But how can a Nation with very limited territory, with 

 very large wants, a Nation which according to current 

 opinion understands the value of money, and as the Belgian 

 forester quoted by Mr. Rowntree (in his " Land and Labour 

 in Belgium ") put it, goes reaUy foolish lengths in its obsessed- 

 ness with the idea : " will it pay ? " allow things to come 

 to such a pass, national resources allotted by Providence 

 to run so lamentably to waste ? Lord Selborne has supplied 

 one answer, already quoted, to that question. But at the 

 bottom of that preference for rabbits spoken of by him lies 

 our old Pandora's gift, which has' so much that is amiss 

 in our land system to answer for : ^our landowners are for 

 the most part mere life tenants, whose personal interest 

 it is rather to take money out of their property than to put 

 any in. Why should they invest money from which they 

 stand to reap no return ? It is a long, long way to the 

 Tipperary of a return from forest trees. Where the owner 

 is full owner and the land is readily saleable without abstract 

 of title and the rest of that heavy taxation imposed upon 

 land by solicitors, growing timber is worth its value at 

 any time and at any stage of its growth, like a bill more 

 or less approaching maturity. If the investment bear no 

 interest in the investor's lifetime, it will increase the selling 

 value of his possession. Beyond that, life tenancy of large 

 areas of land carries with it the pretence, if not in all cases 

 the reality, of great wealth, which, as it is supposed, can 

 afford to neglect remunerative outlay and, in defiance of 

 the national interest, prefer sport to remunerativeness. 

 In Germany, so, in the course of a paper read before the 



