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anomalies and hardships may have been suffered by some individuals, few countries in the world will emerge from the post-war period of readjustment with as sound an economic structure as New Zealand. In retrospect the original post-war plan for forestry providing for the employment of over 4,000 men, largely in order to overtake serious arrears of silvicultural work, appears difficult to understand, but investigations show that towards the close of the war there was an almost universal fear of unemployment due to anticipated difficulties of conversion from a wartime to a peacetime economy. Virtually every country planned accordingly a full employment policy without realizing that the enormous accumulations of repair and maintenance work and of new capital construction, coupled with a huge pent-up demand for raw materials and consumer goods, would create the greatest man-power shortage in history and one which is likely to last for almost a decade, though perhaps threatened at times by sharp but short recessions in trade. It is against the background of this man-power shortage that forest works must now be planned for the immediate future. I have, &c., Alex. R. Entrican, Director of Forestry. The Hon. the Commissioner of State Forests.

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