286 Practical Forestry 



and the ominous signs of a timber famine, little or nothing 

 has been done, save the holding of meetings by the Board 

 of Agriculture and the purchase of a few hundred acres of 

 waste land in Scotland. 



To sum up briefly, the situation is this : England's im- 

 ports before the war rapidly increased from a trifle under 3 J 

 millionloads in 1 864 to fully 10 millionloads in 1 906, thus show- 

 ing an increment of fully 7 million loads in forty-two years. 



Most European countries have large internal supplies of 

 timber, so that, by a system of conserving and protective 

 tariffs, the pinch of want would not be felt severely for 

 years to come. But not so England, which is almost wholly 

 dependent on supplies from abroad. 



According to the Secretary of the Agricultural Department 

 of Washington, the area of forests in the United States is 

 700 million acres, but even now the States are more or less 

 dependent on Canada, and actually receive the entire surplus 

 from that country. But regarding the United States, ex- 

 President Roosevelt said : "If the present rate of forest 

 destruction is allowed to continue with nothing to offset it, 

 a timber famine in the future is inevitable. Remember 

 that you can prevent such a famine occurring by wise action 

 taken in time ; but once the famine occurs there is no pos- 

 sible way of hurrying the growth of trees necessary to 

 relieve it." Again, the late Mr. Lewis Miller, who had vast 

 forests both in Sweden and Nova Scotia, told me that in 

 twenty-five years neither the United States nor Canada 

 will have much timber left, while Sweden and Finland are 

 already played out. " I am also of opinion," he said, 

 " that during the next twenty-five years timber will be 

 double its present price, and that it will not only pay to 

 plant land valued at 3s. per acre, but that worth 20s. per 

 acre." These are no idle words, but the records of those 

 who know well what they are talking about ; neither are 

 the writers in any sense pessimists. With all these warn- 

 ings from men whose business it is to study the question and 

 who are fully qualified to advance an opinion, surely it is 

 time that we took up seriously the question of afforestation. 



It may be said by some that the timber of our foreign 



