298 ECONOMICS OF FORESTRY. 



Sweden and Norway have been the great forest 

 exploiters and exporters of wood materials of the 

 last fifty years, supplying especially England with 

 most of her needs. A comparatively large forest 

 area (over 60,000,000 acres) accessible to water 

 transportation by the many fiords and streams in- 

 vited this exploitation, the product of which, to the 

 extent of over 60 per cent, goes to England and 

 France and amounts now to nearly 2,000,000,000 

 feet, B.M. 



In Sweden, which contains nearly three-fourths 

 of the forest area, crude beginnings of government 

 interest are recorded from about the year 1500. 

 In the year 1720 a director of forests was ap- 

 pointed, the germ of the present Government 

 Forest Department. It was then that the previous 

 lax poHcy of the government gave place to a some- 

 what sentimental solicitude. " It is rather amus- 

 ing to read the jeremiads that were given utterance 

 to both inside and outside the Riksdag by the 

 men of light and leading of that age with regard 

 to the question of forest exhaustion, when only the 

 fringe of the woodlands had been touched and 

 forest property had scarcely a nominal value as a 

 realizable asset . . . the champions of a policy of 

 restriction originated equally as much in an appre- 

 hended deterioration of climate as in an actual 

 scarcity of wood. Both these apprehensions proved 

 groundless, and we have the testimony of one 

 of the foremost pubUc men of Sweden that the 



