RECAPITULATION. 185. 
recently by the Hon. W. H. Herries to amount to 644,566 acres, and 
popularly to 2,000,000 acres. But over all this good work hangs the 
dark shadow of ahenation without forest demarcation, the degradation 
or loss of natural resources and of prospective population, following the 
destruction of good forest on poor mountain soil, 
It should be noted that three Australian States have already begun 
the employment of returned soldiers on forestry, two with funds provided 
for the purpose of the Federal Government; while the London Times 
of the 10th July, 1918, reports Mr. Prothero’s statement to the House 
of Commons that arrangements were already in hand for employing dis- 
abled soldiers and officers on the new £15,000,000 scheme for British 
forestry after the war. 
Reading the history of New Zealand, it is difficult to discern that the 
country has ever been called upon to face so serious an issue as that 
now before it in the forest question; for indiscriminate forest-destruction 
has gone so far that only a short further persistence in the present policy 
will render the restoration of the forests almost impossible at any reason- 
able cost. That will mean the final loss of the finest forests in the 
Southern Hemisphere, and with them the loss of an export trade worth, 
in the future, more than either wool or dairy-produce. It will mean 
the loss of land-settlement at the rate of one family per 75 acres, 
the bulk of this settlement being on the present ‘‘ unoccupied third ”’ 
of New Zealand, It will mean the loss of the best industry that 
New Zealand has ever possessed or is ever likely to possess, and the handi- 
capping of two or three other industries in depriving them of their raw 
material at economical rates. It will mean a continued rise in the 
present high cost of living, for the destruction of all the acces- 
sible forest has already put New Zealand into so tight a corner 
that the people have to makeshift with a timber-use of less than 
one-sixth that of the United States of America, where only about half the 
houses are wood; and with a firewood-use (Railway returns) in New 
Zealand centres of population of only one-twenty-fifth that of the United 
States! Or, to take countries with no surplus forest, New Zealand has 
less than one-quarter the firewood-use of France and Germany; while the 
present consumption of sawn timber in New Zealand, with almost all the 
houses built of wood, is not much in excess of Germany, where it is only 
in a few country hamlets that one still sees any wooden houses. 
The square issue before the country now is whether New Zealand is 
to have national forests (like nearly every civilized country but England, 
and as a result of the war England is now starting them), which will 
eventually bear more than the whole burden of the war debt, with all 
the indirect advantages that forestry brings in its train; or is the 
Dominion to pile up the enhanced liabilities of a country without national 
forests! Is New Zealand to have the forests of the most advanced 
countries of central Hurope (see war-map, p. 188), or the forests 
of the long-misgoverned countries of Europe—Portugal, Spain, Italy, 
Greece, and Turkey? Is New Zealand prepared to pay a propor- 
tion of the £43,000,000 a year that England was paying for 1m- 
ported timber when the war broke out? (*‘ Australian Forestry,”’ 
p. 200). Or, even worse than that, to suffer the race-deterioration 
following rural depopulation that the visitor sees only too plainly in the 
England and Scotland of to-day? Is New Zealand prepared to enter on 
the same path of national decay which inevitably follows rural depopula- 
tion? It must ever be remembered that the present population of bread- 
