Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Forestry
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cultivators, and those who produce the wheat and
maize of the country, are not the “homesteaders”
or settlers who obtain their land for nothing, and
are only obliged to cultivate a small part of it for five
years; it is rather the men who buy their land from
these settlers or from the railway companies which,
during one period, obtained large grants of land
from the government. In Finland complaints,
apparently well-grounded, are heard of settlers who tried
to obtain land simply in order to re-sell the woods
which were given to them so liberally for almost
nothing. The more recent laws reserve to the Forest
Administration the right to sell all full-grown timber
for ten years; but such reservation is hardly sufficient.
There is scarcely any opportunity, for instance, of
selling scattered outlying trees. The Forest Administration
is doubtless right when it recommends that
these free gifts of agricultural land and large tracts of
forest should be discontinued. In Sweden the
government has been obliged to repurchase large areas of
land from the settlers in Jämtland, who had got them
for nothing, and whose rights in the forest clashed
with the right of the Lapps to use the forest pastures
for their reindeer. A new provincial law in Sweden
has tried to check the settlers’ prompt destruction of
their woods, by an order that they must cut trees only
under the direction of the Forest Administration. It
has been proposed to imitate this proceeding in
Finland, but it would be better not to give away these
large tracts of forest, and so avoid subsequent
interference with natural liberty. Such restrictions rarely
answer; and where it is in the public interest to
preserve and manage the forests it is better for the State
to do the work itself. This fact is not sufficiently
recognised in the matter of the settlers; their too
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