14 THE SAD PLIGHT OF BRITISH FOEESTEY 



The forests of Belgium cover 1,750,000 acres, and yield 

 a return of £4,000,000 sterling a year. The existing 

 3,000,000 acres of woodland in Great Britain and Ireland, 

 if under management equally skilful and careful as the 

 Belgian, ought to give £7,000,000 a year. What is the 

 income from them ? Who can tell ? 



The prospect is not reassuring if we turn to the State 

 woodlands for instruction in profitable management. Our 

 greatest national forest — the New Forest — contains 63,000 

 acres, whereof Parliament has decreed (by the Act of 1877) 

 that 46,000 acres shall be kept for ever, in the words of 

 Mr. Lascelles, as ' a vast pleasure-ground, combined with 

 a cattle-farm.' He pays it too high a compliment. The 

 ' cattle-farm ' is nothing but miserably poor pasture, grazed 

 in common. There are also 17,600 acres of thriving wood, 

 planted before sentiment prevailed over common-sense, 

 and 4600 acres of decaying wood, for which sentiment 

 will not allow common -sense to provide the necessary 

 regeneration. 



In very few of the other State forests — even in those 

 like the 25,000 acres of the Forest of Dean, where wood 

 is grown and cut to supply the market — do the returns 

 meet the expenditure, let alone paying the rent of the 

 land. There is no net income, but a deficit; and the 

 same is undoubtedly the case in regard to the woodland 

 upon nineteen estates out of twenty in the United King- 

 dom. 



If I am acquitted of any desire to interfere with the 

 peculiar character of park scenery, scarcely shall I be 

 suspected of any enmity to field-sports. Yet it would 

 be idle to refuse to recognise that in the list of British 

 field-sports there are two whereof the effect is directly 



