CONSERVATORS’ WORK 121 
the State Treasury. Such comparisons might be 
continued almost indefinitely, but they now serve 
no useful purpose. These gentlemen acted up to 
their lights when they exclaimed that protection 
from fire might result in such an increase in insect 
life that the adjacent crops would be destroyed, or 
asserted that natural regeneration could make way 
against excessive grazing, or that the actual presence 
of the forest proved that it was immune from the 
attacks of man, and no argument could convince 
them that their lights were darkness; for in those 
days Lord Curzon had not introduced the now all- 
powerful expert-specialist to the notice of the Indian 
Empire, and the protests of the forester, sometimes 
uselessly violent, passed unheeded. 
In practice, therefore, if not in theory, forestry 
was arrayed on one side, and the people on the other. 
The outcry against restrictions imposed on the present 
generation, so that something might be left to their 
successors—the prohibition, in short, of spending the 
capital instead of only the interest—was to some 
extent misunderstood to voice the claims of the 
future as well as of the existing population, and 
Revenue officials who took this view were right in 
defending such claims, not knowing them to be 
imaginary. It was but very slowly that confidence 
was created, but each Revenue officer who became 
a convert to the importance of State forestry was 
capable of exerting, both on the people and on other 
officials, an influence more effective than the labours 
of a multitude of solitary foresters; and when, per- 
chance, the knowledgeable interest of some high 
official was aroused, the progress made, even in a 
