170 THE NEW FOREST 



hoard. But it is not reasonable to hold up 

 English Forestry to contempt, as compared with 

 continental methods, when two entirely different 

 methods are being pursued. It may be that 

 the English method is the worse of the two, 

 but if the accounts of the two systems could 

 be compared, I am not sure which of them 

 would, on the whole, show the better balance. 



There is no doubt that the revenue obtained 

 by thus heavily thinning these plantations of 

 a hundred years old was a very large one. The 

 difficulty was, how to deal with the standing 

 crop that remained when the last cutting that 

 could reasonably be called a "thinning" had 

 taken place. 



Of course, a German forester would not hesi- 

 tate for a moment. He would simply and quite 

 rightly, in accordance with sound forestry clear 

 the whole standing crop and plant anew, or 

 he would endeavour to provide a young crop to 

 spring up to succeed the older generation that 

 he was realising for profit. 



But in the New Forest we have no choice. 

 The Act of 1877, which laid down a system of 

 sentimental Forestry, provided that under no 

 circumstances was a single acre of plantation 

 to be " wholly levelled or cleared," so that, good 

 or bad, decadent or not, a " sufficient number " 



