xiv THE TIMBERS OF THE WORLD 



be taken to use timber to the fullest and best advantage. It calls for the 

 recognition of the importance of timber trees in the multitudinous needs 

 of the community. 



In England these three considerations are but little regarded. The 

 majority of our population show an indifference to the subject which is 

 but the measure of their ignorance of it, while our educational and 

 administrative authorities continue to neglect it in a manner which 

 accounts for the general apathy. 



This common lack of knowledge leads in many cases not merely to a 

 passive disregard, but often to an active mutilation and disfigurement. 

 Boys particularly, are prone to damage trees simply because they have 

 not been taught to value them. 



The forests of England have been a source of national safety and 

 national prosperity in the past. A sea-faring nation whose history in the 

 last three hundred years has been one of the imperial expansion of an 

 island race, we owe it largely to our home timber supplies that our ships 

 obtained this supremacy. Again, in the centuries before the general 

 development of our coal deposits, it was the great Forest of the Weald 

 that made the Sussex ironwork industry possible. 



We see then that our national timber supply has been of the utmost 

 value to us in the past. This is no longer so. The manner of our forest 

 utilisation has been wasteful and without forethought. Whole areas 

 have been denuded of trees which might have continued to give a supply 

 of home-grown timber ; while, as with other commodities, we have relied 

 of late years to a needless extent upon foreign supplies. 



An educational system which is adequate should rightly include some 

 knowledge of the vital needs of the country, some realisation of the 

 possibilities of our national resources. In our schools there is an almost 

 complete neglect of that necessary function of education which should 

 develop the child as a member of an economic community, giving to him 

 a grasp of the material needs and resources of his country, and opening 

 up before him avenues of industrial interest. Commercial geography 

 does, for instance, claim to fulfil this function, but educational reforms 

 need time before they can justify themselves, and the spread of modem 

 methods of teaching geography upon these lines is all too slow. It is too 

 often thought that discipUnary and humanistic subjects are necessarily 

 divorced from those which are valuable commercially. This is unfortunate. 

 There is no reason why science should not be more often presented in its 

 commercial relations. At present the teaching of science and geography 

 in our schools lays itself open to the old charge levelled against the 

 classical tradition. It was urged that classical education was remote 

 from life. It was said to touch no springs of living or material interest. 

 It had no relation to modern needs. Might not the same be said 



