106 KAURI FOREST LEFT. 
see no serious competition to Kauri in the world’s markets dn the future, 
It must rise steadily in value for the present, and rapidly when the 
famine in this class begins. 
Mnemontc—PRESENT-DAY VALUE OF THE NormAu Kaur! Forest, 
With an acrim 100 and 2 bob the cube, 
Less than double the price of Kauri to-day, 
Normal forest yields 10 pounds and 16 net yearly. 
If there’s no young timber and a wait of a century, 
Land-value becomes then 2 hundred and seventy, 
Or at 4 per cent. now 5 pounds 7 nearly, 
KAUR FOREST LEFT. 
The destruction of the Kauri forest in the past, according to Anglo- 
Saxon traditions without examining its value, is evidently a national 
calamity, comparable in its effects to the present war. That is a state- 
ment that will not be readily accepted by those who have grown up with 
the forest policy of the past, but facts are stubborn. A large-scale map 
of Europe (p. 188) shows how the development of modern industrial 
Europe has taken place on lines exactly the opposite of development im 
New Zealand as far as forestry is concerned, and to the traveller in 
Europe that development, up to the outbreak of war, was marvellous. 
That was the verdict of the ninety Englishmen who went through the 
German forests on the official tour in September, 1915, with Sir W. 
Schlich, the Professor of Forestry at the Oxford University. England, 
comparatively, was stationary. The large-scale war maps show clearly 
how suburban, communal, and other forests in mid-Europe are located 
near centres of population to supply them with timber and firewood, 
which are economic necessities of civilized life as much as food and water 
supply. Under “‘ Forest Policy’ I shall give some particulars of town 
and suburban forests in Europe. It has been shown above how Kauri 
must be regarded as not only the biggest timber-yielding tree in the 
world, but also one of the most valuable of timber-trees. 
In quite early days it was evident that Auckland was becoming an 
important centre of population. Yet its future wants were not provided 
for. The scrub, the poor forest, the good forest on land too rich to 
keep under forest, the priceless forest of Kauri on poor soil, all went 
together as the result of indiscriminate destruction without demarcation ! 
By 1903 (incredible as it may seem) the Land Commissioner, Auckland, 
reported “‘there are scarcely any forest reservations within forty to 
sixty miles north or south of Auckland, as almost every inch of that 
ground was disposed of thirty years ago.’’ 
There is no evidence that anything then was known of what was going 
on in the Continent of Europe, where the broken and impoverished wild 
forests had been turned into cultivated forests of ever-increasing value, 
the Church lands and princely estates that had come down from feudal 
times forming the nuclei for the building-up of the modern national 
forests. Instead of this, provincial ideas were in fashion at Auckland 
—a penny of ready money to-day and the future to take care of itself! 
_ As the forest retreated, with the policy of indiscriminate destruction 
without forest demarcation, first firewood became valueless, then fencing- 
poles, and then timber. Meantime in Auckland the price of living was 
rising, Kauri (the sole timber cut in those days) was ever increasing in 
value, and to-day, as has been seen, average prices are more than double 
