RECAPITULATION. «183 
Strips of Self-spreading Trees.—The introduction of valuable foreign 
trees is a special feature of interplanting. A portion of such exotic trees 
may be expected to spread naturally as introduced vegetation of other 
kinds has spread in New Zealand. This is an important measure of 
general forest policy throughout the forests of New Zealand, and as such 
will be discussed more fully later. Whether these exotic trees spread 
naturally or not, whether the growth and quality of the timber is all that 
is expected or not, the cost involved is small compared to that of making 
regular plantations of exotic trees. 
EMPLOYMENT AND SETTLEMENT. 
_ A careful official inquiry has shown that employment on the purely 
pastoral sheep-runs of New Zealund averages only one man per 3,003 
acres. Looking at land-settlement too much through British spectacles, 
it has been supposed that all the forest lands should be turned into 
pasture and thrown open for settlement. The map of Europe shows a very 
difierent picture from that of the British Isles with its sad rural depopu- 
lation. In the Rhine Valley, probably the best cultivated and most highly 
industrialized part,of Europe, the area under forest is about one-third 
of the total area, and over the whole State of Baden it is 38 per cent. 
This is well shown in the two extracts from Phillips’s large-scale war-map 
of Europe at p. 188. | 
Two facts must be grasped: (1) Timber can be grown in the well- 
cultivated forests of central Europe to compete in the open market with 
timber being brought from wild forest in America and from half-wild 
forest in Sweden and Hungary; (2) these cultivated forests of central 
Europe give employment at the average rate of one man working through- 
out the year per 105 acres. (Details will be found at p. 94. 
Taking the shorter and warmer working-day of New Zealand, this is 
equivalent to one man per 75 acres. The balance-sheet shows how easily 
a cultivated Kauri forest could support this charge, and still contribute 
to the State at the rate of £10 16s. net per acre per year. In all calcu- 
lations in this report employment in fully developed and cultivated 
forests is theréfore reckoned at the rate of one man per 75 acres. Such 
State-forest employees are settled more permanently on the land than 
most farmers; they earn more than the average dairy-farmer, and, 
settled in model hamlets, escape the isolation and monotonous life of the 
isolated farmer. In Europe forest-work in winter and farm-work im 
summer is the usual practice. This increases and varies the year’s work, 
rendering it so much more profitable that the small farmer in France 
and Germany, assisted by his forest winter earnings, is better off in 
health and pocket than the corresponding townsman. 
UNDERRATED VALUE OF THE New ZEALAND Forest. 
Australians describe their Eucalypt forests as the finest hardwood 
forests of the world. That may be true, but hardwoods have at best 
only a secondary value on the world’s markets. In many countries the 
hardwoods in the forest are not considered worth cutting. The world 
uses some nine softwood trees for every hardwood tree. If the Australian 
forests had been mainly softwood instead of hardwood, the destruction of 
the New Zealand softwood forests would have been of less importance to 
the timber-markets of the Southern Hemisphere. 
New Zealand had the finest softwood forests in the Southern Hemi- 
sphere (see Plate XVIII), and can still keep that position if the reckless 
