AFFORESTATION.
[To THE EDITOR Or TIDO " SPROTATOR."1 SIR,—Nobody who has read the Spectator as long as I have can doubt your sincerity when you say that you "yield to none in your desire to maintain the beauty of these islands." Still, I cannot help thinking that it is little short of a national misfortune that a journal with the power and influence of the Spectator should take such a rigid and, as I think, wrong-headed view of afforeetation projects. It may easily make the whole difference between some start being made in this desirable direction and the whole thing being shelved for a generation. I am a very old subscriber to the Spectator, and there are hundreds of things for which I am grateful to it. I admit its almost uniformly sane attitude on public questions, and even on this subject I am grateful for its fairness in printing Mr. W. Robinson's eloquent letter of February 20bh advocating views so opposed to its own. All over the country trees are disappearing ; the tendency is towards one dead level of sordid utilitarianism. In my own purely rural district there is no wood within walking distance. I cannot find one without taking a train for at least a score of miles. I have no wish that the country should commit itself to the vast expenditure you mention, but surely it could do nothing but good to try a few experiments, public and private, on lands fit for timber-growing, and fit for little else, such as those Mr. Robinson describes. As far as one can learn, neither France nor Germany is the poorer for her glorious State-owned forests, and it is undeniable that they are a delight and joy to the dwellers in those countries. I venture to hope that you will, on further consideration, modify your uncompromising hostility to this most entrancing project of gradually converting Britain into a real woodland country. Its beauty would be doubled, and its climate in all probability vastly improved. Now seems the ,psychological moment when some sort of modest beginning might be
[To planting on aesthetic grounds, provided the burden on the State is of a strictly limited amount, we have no objection, and desire to see public bodies encouraged to plant with a view to natural beauty. When, however, we are asked to assent to a vast speculation in timber-growing, which, in our opinion, is certain to prove an economic, and probably an arboreal, failure, we must protest with all the power at our command. We are convinced that we can make a much better use of our money than spending it on growing trees for timber. If that is so, ibis a crime to force people by taxation to give up their money for this purpose.—En. SPOtator.]
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