72 THE PUHIPUHI KAURI FOREST. 
of well-placed good timber. If the royalty loss on the hh timber 
has been near £4,000,000 (p. 67), the industrial loss is therefore some- 
where near £12,000,000. It is true that a large part, possibly the larger 
part, of the scorched and worm-eaten timber was sawn up and thus pro- 
vided work and wages. But that this was not much to deduct from 
the £4,000,000 is shown by the comparatively small total amount that 
was recovered as royalty on all timber worked (p. 61). And this does 
not take account of indirect losses in railway transport, handling, 
timber-merchants’ profits, and economical raw material for carpentering, 
furniture-making, and other trades. It was a black page in the indus- 
trial history of the British Empire when the Puhipuhi Forest was burnt! 
It was on a par with the depopulation of the Highlands of Scotland 
when the crofters and their industries were driven out to make room 
also for sheep, their industries, fishing, land-cultivating, and timber- 
working. The Highland glens still show unmistakably the fine forest 
that once grew there—forest of Scotch-pine with brown-coloured durable 
wood smelling like cedar. 
From a forestry point of view the destruction of the Puhipuhi Forest 
was anarchy in one of the most important branches of the administration 
of a civilized country! Undoubtedly that would be the view taken by 
a Frenchman, a German, a Japanese, or the inhabitant of any country 
with its forestry organized on modern lines. 
The excesses of the Commune in 1871 cost Paris some solid millions; 
but a large part of that came back in wages, and it all happened in a 
few days. The Puhipuhi industrial loss of £12,000,000 was spread over 
twenty-five or thirty years, and of that loss but a fraction came back in 
wages. Once or twice each summer there was a blood-red haze in the 
western horizon ! 
As a contrast the following mnemonic summarizes the improvement in 
Prussian forests during an average lifetime of about seventy-four 
years : — 
Increased yield Prussia in a 7-4 life, 
Was nine times timber and more’n ten times gold 
Up to ten years before the present strife,* 
And the Forest Department one-forty years old. 
Prussian timber, 1830, one penny the cubet 
But a metric tickyt before the great feud.* 



* The war of 1914. + = 1 cubic foot, a phrase used in countries where the cubic 
foot is the unit of timber-measurement. {South African term for the smallest silver 
coin, 3d. The metric ticky = 2-4d. or £0-01. 
