The preservation, the protection of the forest, guaranteed anew by charter, is at present (1853) once again a question of the day, and in German legislative assemblies in recent years weighty words have been uttered in favor of the forest from the point of view of the political economist.  Thus it is again becoming popular to defend the poor much-abused forest.  The forest, however, has not only an economic, but also a social-political value.  He who from liberal political principles denies the distinction between city and country should also, after the English model, seek to do away with the distinction between the field and the forest.  Wherever common possession of the forest continues to exist side by side with private possession of the field, there will never be any real social equality among the people.  In the cultivation of the soil the forest represents the aristocracy; the field represents the middle class.

The concessions made by the different governments in the matter of forest-clearing, of the preservation of game, the free use of the forest, etc., form a pretty exact instrument with which to measure the triumphant advance of the aristocratic or the democratic spirit.  In the year 1848 many a vast tract of forest was sacrificed in order to purchase therewith a small fraction of popularity.  Every revolution does harm to the forest, but, provided it does not wish to strangle itself, it leaves the field untouched.

After December 2, 1851, the gathering of fallen leaves in the forest was countenanced in Alsace in order to make the Napoleonic coup d’ etat popular.  It was cleverly thought out; for the never-resting war about the forest can be for a government a mighty lever of influence on a class of the people which is, in general, hard enough to swing round.  The concession permitting the gathering of leaves, and manhood suffrage, are one and the same act of shrewd Bonapartist policy, only aimed at different classes.  Thus social politics lurks even behind the forest-trees and beneath the rustling red leaves of last autumn—­a strange circle of cause and effect!  The immoderate cultivation of potatoes contributes not a little to saddle the modern State with the proletariat, but this same cultivation of potatoes, which deprives the small peasant of straw, drives him into the forest to seek for withered leaves in place of straw for his cattle, and thus places again in the hands of the State authorities a means—­based upon the strange historic ruin of our forest-franchises—­of curbing a powerful part of the proletariat.

Popular sentiment in Germany considers the forest to be the one large piece of property which has not yet been completely portioned off.  In contrast to field, meadow, and garden, every one has a certain right to the forest, even if it consists merely in being able to run about in it at pleasure.  In the right, or the permission, to gather wood and dry leaves and to pasture cattle, in the distribution of