The Rangitikei Advocate. TWO EDITIONS DAILY. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1917.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XLI, Issue 11418, 22 December 1917, Page 4

The Rangitikei Advocate. TWO EDITIONS DAILY. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1917.

OBSERVERS in Groat Britain aro s e riously The Menace On The concerned Horizon. over the rapid and menacing growth among what aro known as the working classes of views akin to Syndicalism. There appears indeed to be a leaven working all over the globe which is destined to bring about at no remote period either a radical change of the existing economic situation or its entire replacement by something that has not yet taken definite shape in the minds of those who are endeavouring to undermine and discredit the established order of things. The loaders of the masses have as yet no definite scheme of reconstruction, but are seemingly bent first on destruction, and rather trusting to chance or an all round compromise to re-establish stable new conditions. It is a modified form of the social disease that is now afflicting Russia. The great mass of the workers are too intelligent to, be led or driven into anything like the excesses of the Maximalists, but if social economists, who are now sounding a note of warning in the larger British journals are not mistaken, when the war is over and the millions of men return, the votes of vast organisations will be utilised for the purpose of bringing about a fundamental change in the relations of capital and labour.

A VALUABLE lesson in the great

economic value Tree Planting. of tree planting is now being demonstrated in Scotland. A hundred years ago the then Duke of Athol determined to plant the bare mountain sides of his estate with vast numbers of trees, in the belief that his enterprise would be a benefit to posterity. He had seen the shifts to which Britain had been put for timber in the days of the Napoleonic wars and evidently had a patriotic as well as a business object in view in his plantations. “My plantations,” he declared, ‘‘will make up and probably be productive of an income to a much greater amount than that of any subject in the Kingdom. ’ ’ He said confidently that if one-fourth part of his larches arrived at maturity by the ‘end of the century, they would supply ‘ ‘all the demands of Great Britain for war or commerce.” He planted 15,573 acres, mainly of barren mountain side, with 27,431,600 young trees. Many other northern landowners followed his lead. Although heavy winds during the century have played havoc with some of the plantations, and the cheapness end pleutifulness of foreign timber seemed as though the Duke’s investment would turn out to be only a moderately lucrative one, liis prediction has now been abundantly verified. A splendid reserve of timber whivh now clothes the hills, is being utilised for a hundred needs. By their rings woodmen can tell the ages of the trees and find that the giants, one of which w*s twentyseven inches di meter at the stump and 100 feet high, show 00, 95, 100, and 105 years. Yet although such splendid results may be obtained, j

and we have in New Zealand hundreds of thousands of acres, which are only fit for growing trees, our Governments have had to be actually hustled.into planting only a few acres per annum.