14 THE SAD PLIGHT OF BRITISH FORESTRY 



The forests of Belgium cover 1,750,000 acres, and yield 

 a return of 4,000,000 sterling a year. The existing 

 3,000,000 acres of woodland in Great Britain and Ireland, 

 if under management equally skilful and careful as the 

 Belgian, ought to give 7,000,000 a year. What is the 

 income from them ? Who can tell ? 



The prospect is not reassuring if we turn to the State 

 woodlands for instruction in profitable management. Our 

 greatest national forest the New Forest contains 63,000 

 acres, whereof Parliament has decreed (by the Act of 1877) 

 that 46,000 acres shall be kept for ever, in the words of 

 Mr. Lascelles, as ' a vast pleasure-ground, combined with 

 a cattle-farm.' He pays it too high a compliment. The 

 ' cattle-farm ' is nothing but miserably poor pasture, grazed 

 in common. There are also 17,600 acres of thriving wood, 

 planted before sentiment prevailed over common-sense, 

 and 4600 acres of decaying wood, for which sentiment 

 will not allow common -sense to provide the necessary 

 regeneration. 



In very few of the other State forests even in those 

 like the 25,000 acres of the Forest of Dean, where wood 

 is grown and cut to supply the market do the returns 

 meet the expenditure, let alone paying the rent of the 

 land. There is no net income, but a deficit; and the 

 same is undoubtedly the case in regard to the woodland 

 upon nineteen estates out of twenty in the United King- 

 dom. 



If I am acquitted of any desire to interfere with the 

 peculiar character of park scenery, scarcely shall I be 

 suspected of any enmity to field-sports. Yet it would 

 be idle to refuse to recognise that in the list of British 

 field-sports there are two whereof the effect is directly 



