The political economists argue that the amount of wood which can be supplied by our present forests is by no means too great for the satisfaction of the demand—­that, if anything, it is too small.  Those, however, whose enmity to the forest is based on political principles detail to us the yearly increasing substitutes for wood, and point triumphantly to the not far distant time when forests will no longer be needed, when all forest land can be turned into cultivated land, so that every glebe of earth in civilized Europe shall produce sufficient nourishment for a man.  This idea of seeing every little patch of earth dug up by human hands strikes the imagination of every natural man as something appallingly uncanny; it is especially repugnant to the German spirit.  When that comes to pass it will be high time for the day of judgment to dawn.  Emmanuel Geibel, in his poem Mythus, has symbolized this natural aversion to the extreme measures of a civilization which would absorb every form of wild nature.  He creates a legend about the demon of steam, who is chained and forced to do menial service.  The latter will break his bonds again and with his primitive titanic strength, which has been slumbering in the heart of the world, he will destroy the very earth itself when once the whole ball has been covered with the magic network of the railroads.  Before that time all the forests will have been turned into cultivated land.

The advocates of the forest resort to a feeble method of defense when they demand the preservation of the present moderate forest area solely on economic grounds.  The social-political reasons certainly weigh quite as heavy.  Hew down the forest and you will at the same time destroy the historic bourgeois society.—­In the destruction of the contrast between field and forest you are taking a vital element away from German nationality.  Man does not live by bread alone; even if we no longer required any wood we should still demand the forest.  The German people need the forest as a man needs wine, although for our mere necessities it might be quite sufficient if the apothecary alone stored away ten gallons in his cellar.  If we do not require any longer the dry wood to warm our outer man, then all the more necessary will it be for the race to have the green wood, standing in all its life and vigor, to warm the inner man.

In our woodland villages—­and whoever has wandered through the German mountains knows that there are still many genuine woodland villages in the German Fatherland—­the remains of primitive civilization are still preserved to our national life, not only in their shadiness but also in their fresh and natural splendor.  Not only the woodland, but likewise the sand dunes, the moors, the heath, the tracts of rock and glacier, all wildernesses and desert wastes, are a necessary supplement to the cultivated field lands.  Let us rejoice that there is still so much wilderness left in Germany.  In order for a nation