SOUTH AFRICAN FORESTRY. 3 



connection with the great social question of the rural population. 

 If the loss of this goes forward at the present rate, the Empire must 

 fall to pieces for want of recruits for the Army. In Germany it is 

 estimated that the yearly wages of the people employed on forest 

 industries amount to something like ,30, 000,000 sterling, and that 

 roughly 12 per cent, of the total population of Germany is employed 

 in the forest and out of the forest. About 1,000,000 people in the 

 forest, i.e., directly employed in working the forest estates, and about 

 3,000,000 out of the forest, i.e., in working the forest produce, chiefly 

 timber, into the various articles manufactured from wood. These 

 forest workers in Germany are the pick of its manhood, the backbone 

 of the nation. In England they have been replaced by the weakly, 

 hysterical, knock-kneed factory operative, and his sickly tea-drinking 

 wife, whose mistaken ambition is to avoid the health and strength 

 following manual labour out-of-doors ! These are sad facts which 

 struck me very forcibly when travelling through the forests of the 

 Continent and the rural districts of England. It was not till I got 

 to Scotland that I saw a woman working out-of-doors. In the first 

 part of the Boer war, out of 11,000 men offering themselves as recruits 

 in the Manchester district 8,000 were found to be physically unfit to 

 carry a rifle " and of the 3,000 who were accepted, only about 1,200 

 attained the moderate standard of muscular power and chest measure- 

 ment required by the military authorities," (R. E. Dudgeon, M.D.) 

 England can better afford to pay the cost of its wasted forests, viz., 

 ^20, 000,000 a year, than allow the present waste of its manhood 

 to proceed! 



Not only is there a loss of non-production within the British 

 Isles, but the cost of importation by sea of so bulky a material as 

 timber is naturally very heavy. To produce within the British Isles 

 the timber now imported would require an area of about nine million 

 acres of forest, that is to say, one acre of forest to 8J acres of open 

 country. This would amount to on an average about i J " New 

 Forests " to every county. Germany as we have seen has one acre 

 of forest to every 4 acres of open country. Cape Colony spends 

 ^60,000 per year on its Forestry, or about one per cent of its average 

 revenue. If England were to reforest at the same rate ^ 1,000,000 

 yearly would represent the forest expenditure, and about two-thirds of 

 a county the area of restored country. France spends over half a 

 million yearly on Forestry. 



According to the report of the recent Commission on British 

 Forestry there are 21,000,000 acres of heather and rough pasturage 

 in England and Scotland available for reforesting ; 8,000,000 acres of 

 forest would produce the timber now imported. It is calculated that 

 if all the waste lands of Great Britain and Ireland were reforested 

 the production of timber (excluding a small proportion of hard- 

 woods) would be 3 or 4 times the timber now imported. (National 

 Forestry" in Jour. Soc. of Arts, Nov., 1899.) 



There is one redeeming feature in the present sad position of 

 Forestry in England. Since the doom of English Forestry was sealed 

 in Henry VIII's time it has not been possible to restore artificially 



