672 REPORT— 1894. 



those privately-owned forests being as well managed as those of the State. It is 

 important to make clear this distinction, because it shows that a State system of 

 conservancy and supervision of forestry is quite compatible with large private 

 ownership in forests, and that efficient sylviculture upon a large scale is not 

 inseparable from State ownership. 



But someone may say, ' We, too, have State forests ! ' Yes, but it is almost 

 absurd to mention them in the same sentence with those of the Continent for any 

 part they play at present in connection with forestry in Britain. The nine thousand 

 acres at Windsor are mainly covered with specimen trees. Of the twenty-five 

 thousand acres in the Forest of Dean, a portion is supposed to be cultivated for a 

 profitable crop, but appears to result in an annual deficit. The New Forest, with 

 its sixty-three thousand acres of soil-area, affords us one of the most interesting 

 object-lessons, showing the triumph of sentiment over common-sense, that the 

 country affords. Its history is well enough known, and I need only remind you 

 that Parliament has decreed the major part of it to persist as a barren waste, whilst 

 in the remainder which is covered with trees the practice of forestry is prohibited, 

 60 that slowly the whole is going to wreck and ruin. This illustrates the value to 

 us of State forests ! In the days of the ' wooden walls ' the dockyards obtained 

 valuable timber from them, but now their large area is, one may say, of no State 

 service whatever as forest, if one excepts a small portion of AVindsor Forest 

 recently attached for instruction purposes to Coopers' Ilill College. There can be 

 no question that if the State had set an example of scientific forestry in even a 

 portion of these areas, the practice of sylviculture now throughout the country 

 would have been very difl^erent. 



I need not dwell on the fact that the conditions of land tenure in the country 

 have exercised an important influence upon the extent of wood-planting in the 

 country; and they must always do so. 'The oak scorns to grow except on free 

 land' is a saw that sums up pithily the relationship between land-laws and wood- 

 lands in England. Copyholders could hardly be e.xpected to plant much timber 

 when the lord of the manor claimed the crop ; and I believe it is possible in some 

 counties to trace the boundaries of copyholds by the entire absence of trees on one 

 side of a line and their luxuriant growth on the opposite side. The intricacies of 

 entail and the fact that life-renters had themselves to bear the expense of planting, 

 except where necessary for shelter, without prospect of seeing a return for the 

 outlay, must have operated prejudicially to an increase in woodlands. Happily, 

 since 1882 in England, and by an Act of last year for Scotland, the last-mentioned 

 restriction upon tree-planting is removed. 



Nor shall I pause over the question of game, which has been at once the 

 origin and the destruction of forests in Britain. Not that it is an unimportant 

 element. But the instinctive love of sport in the ]3ritish race is proof against all 

 argument of utility, and the needs of sport will always be a barrier, as they have 

 been in the past, to the planting of large areas well adapted for timber-growing. 

 It cannot well be otherwise. Landowners can hardly be expected to forego large 

 and immediate game-rents for what appear the long-delayed, even though possibly 

 greater, profits of timber-cultivation. In this case the inevitable must be accepted. 

 Nevertheless, there are large areas, the game-rent of which is infinitesimal for their 

 acreage, which might be planted. 



The most potent factors in bringing about the present condition of our 

 woodlands are probably to be looked for in the nature of the crop itself and 

 in the want of appreciation of its character manifested by landowners ; in a word, 

 in a want of knowledge of the principles of scientific forestry. Forestry is handi- 

 capped as compared with agriculture by the fact that the crop cannot be reaped 

 within the year. The owner who plants and incurs the initial expense of stock, 

 fencinfr, and perhaps draining, may after some years secure intermediate return 

 from thinnings, but it will rarely happen that he reaps the final yield at maturity 

 of the crop he has sown ; it will fall to his successor. It is this planting for 

 posterity that makes demands upon the landowner to which he is unequal. 

 Hence it comes about that woodlands, beyond what may be requisite in the way 

 of cover plantation and for shelter, are often regarded as expensive luxuries, and, 



