A MILLION OF POPULA'TION. 5 
As appears below, £10 net per acre per year can be confidently 
expected from the cultivated Kauri forest of the future. ‘This is a conser- 
vative estimate founded on scrupulously moderate figures. 500,000 acres 
at £10 would put £5,000,000 yearly into the State cofiers of New Zea- 
land, which is better than the Prussian figure of £4,500,000 (p. 186). 
£5,000,000 capitalized at 4 per cent. represents £125,000,000. This 
would cover the cost of the war, it may be hoped, nearly twice over. 
Furthermore, half a million acres of Kauri forest cultivated as in 
Europe would find much forestry work now for returned soldiers, and 
eventual permanent land-settlement exceeding all that has been effected 
up to date, under the closer Land for Settlement Acts since 1892, and the 
Land Settlement Finance Act of 1909.* Half a million acres of cultivated 
Kauri forest would mean some 6,666 families earning good wages, settled 
permanently on the soil (pp. 89, 160), together with many engaged in 
small farming and in the milling and transport of the timber. It would 
mean support to all the wood-using industries and some lowering of 
the cost of house-building and house-rents. These things are to be ob- 
tained by nothing more novel or hazardous than following the colonial 
policy of the French in the latitudes of the Kauri forests on the Mediter- 
ranean ! 
Details of the Kauri forest net revenue and of employment and 
settlement will be found under ‘‘ Balance-sheet of a Kauri Forest ”’ 
(p. 95). 
Kauri the Old-established Safe T'ree.—National money put into 
Kauri forestry is a safe investment. It is difficult to realize what an 
old-established institution the Kauri tree is in New Zealand! Even the 
tree’s geological age 1s enormous. Buried forest occurs in various 
localities; perhaps that at Papakura, near Auckland, is the best-known. 
And oyer all hangs the glittering prospect of the Kauri-resin industry 
eclipsing that of Gascony, with the upgrowth of the restored Kauri 
forests, and the advent of a settled population—la richesse de ce pays-ci, 
as the French curé said to me. (‘‘ Aus. Forestry,’’ p. 259, Brit. Assoc., 
1914.) 
MNEMONIC. 
Half a million acres of restorable Kauri 
Will twice pay the war debt. No Eastern houri 
Could do more for an overtaxed man! 
It may settle near twice the men on the land 
That the two Land Acts,t working hand-in-hand, 
Did up to the outbreak of war— 
Five thousand seyen hundred and eighty. 
CULTIVATED Formsts: A MILuIon or PopuLaTIon. 
Cultivated forests as in Europe if established in New Zealand would 
eventually support a population about equal to the whole present popu- 
lation. Taking the European standard of 25 per cent, forest—the 
standard in the most industrial and best populated parts of Europe— 
New Zealand would require about 16,000,000 acres of national forest. 
The Japanese, with a land of mountainous volcanic islands like New 
Zealand, are taking a forest proportion higher—viz., 65 per cent. ; 
but let us now consider the European proportion, 16,000,000 acres at 
an average of five persons per family, and 200 acres of forest per 




* 5,780 settlers, up to the outbreak of war, is the total under the two Acts. 
«Closer Settlement in New Zealand” by the Under-Secretary of Lands, International 
Institute of Agriculture, Rome, 1916. 
+ 1892 and 1909, 
