in every household in the land.” He 
estimates that, at the present rate of 
consumption, the supply of timber in 
the United States will be exhausted in 
30 years. The lumber business, now the 
fourth greatest industry in the colony, 
will disappear. All forms of building 
industries will suffer. Mining will be- 
come vastly more expensive, and there 
will be a corresponding rise in coal and 
iron. The railways, unless a substitute 
for the wooden sleeper is found, will 
be profoundly affected, and the cost of 
transportation will rise. Farming will 
be more expensive. Water power for 
lighting, manufacturing, and transporta- 
tion will be affected. “Irrigated agri- 
culture will suffer most of all, for the 
destruction of the forests means the 
loss of the waters as surely as night 
follows day. With the rise in the cost 
of producing food, the cost of food itself 
will rise. Commerce in genera] will 
necessarily be affected by the difficulties 
of the primary industries upon which 
it depends. 
fail, the daily life of the average citizen 
will inevitably feel the pinch on every 
side, and the forests have already begun 
to fail.’ Such is the prospect that the 
most eminent expert in America depicts 
for its people, and such, in a modified 
degree, must be our own experience if 
we persistently refuse to heed such 
warnings as these, and to prepare against 
the evil day while yet there is time. 
OUR ONLY HOPE. 
Enough of the Evils of Deforestation; 
and now once more for the remedy! Il 
Lave shown already in these articles 
not only that it is a national duty to 
replant the forests as they are cut 
dewn, but that the work of Reforesta- 
tion and Afforestation can be carried 
cut at a large financial profit to the 
individual or the State. 
ence of other countries has proved this 
incontestably, and the few years dur- 
ing which our Forestry Department has 
been making its little tentative efforts 
at tree-growing here, have shown that 
In a word, when the forests* 
41 
The experi- 
even on a very moderate expenditure a 
regular and substantial return could be 
speedily secured for such an investment 
of public money. The evidence on this 
point that I have compiled and set be- 
fore my readers should, I venture to 
believe, convince any impartial person 
that a national system of Afforestation, 
conducted on a large scale, and managed 
or scientific lines, could not only avert 
for us the many evils that follow on 
the destruction of the native bush, but 
could obviate the otherwise inevitable 
timber famine, furnish profitable em- 
ployment for a large number of work- 
ers, and provide a highly lucrative in- 
vestment for a considerable amount of 
public capital. 
Probably I have said enough to justi- 
iy my contentions, though I have by 
no means exhausted the list of possible 
arguments in favour of reforesting the 
country. I might have referred to the 
value of our water supply as a scurce 
of electrical energy, and the need for 
conserving it; for surely, at a time 
when the whole world is striving to 
utilise water power to generate elec- 
tricity, it is a suicidal policy for a 
country so generously endowed in this 
way to risk the very existence of rivers 
and waterfalls by recklessly destroying 
the forests that provide the reservoirs, 
from which these streams are fed. And 
I might have enlarged upon the value 
cf the bush as a means of checking and 
controlling the movement of sand, and 
the urgent necessity for planting and 
replacing the bush in districts where, as 
along the West Coast of the North 
Island, sand drifts are constantly en- 
croaching upon valuable land. The 
well-known example of France and the 
large revenue that she has derived for 
many years from the plantation of her 
sand-dunes, should be good enough pre- 
cedent for any colonial government to 
follow. And I might have quoted the 
recently published report of the Bri- 
tish Commission on Erosion and Refor- 
estation to show that at Home a na- 
