Prior to the war, in the days when polities were only polities and not matters of life and death, a favourite question to put to parliamentary candidates was upon the subject of afforestation. It allowed them to get a few pious aspirations off their chests. and, as was to be expected, nothing ever happened. The war, however, has done for the United Kingdom what' no amount of questioning succeeded in doing, and the work of afforestation has begun in earnest. During its first year the Fores Commission has planted 1,500 acres of land. and altogether 90,000 acres have already been secured for further planting. A 10 years' scheme is in contemplation, and if carried out to its full extent it will provide an area of 4,770,000 acres of forests. It must be remembered that our home timber supplies were very much depleted during the war, when instead of importing nine-tenths of our supplies, as we did in normal times, we took only one-tenth from abroad. There will now be a chance to repair this wastage. In connexion with—this scheme of afforestation one interesting fact has come to light, that in parts of Scotland the soil is so poor from an agricultural point of view that the raising of trees will be infinitely more profitable than the present practice of grazing sheep. Yet a few years ago there was an outery against allowing deer forests (which are not forests at all) to exist: the fact is that on most of them only a thoroughly heroic animal could live.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.