Through the recently ever-increasing artificial conversion of the proud beech and oak into short-lived pine-forests, which is due to necessity or to a short-sighted financial policy, Germany has lost at least as much of the peculiar character lent to it by its forests as through the complete uprooting of tremendous tracts of woodland.  In the old forest ordinances especial weight is, with good reason, laid upon the protection of the oak-trees.  Even the German Reichstag, as early as the sixteenth century, was occupied with the “art of economizing the woods.”  There are a few kinds of forestry which, to a certain extent, permit the parceling off of the forest—­as, for example, there are localities where forestry and agriculture are carried on, turn and turn about, on the same land; or others where the practice prevails of stripping the bark off the oak-trees, a process which yields a quick monetary return—­these few kinds of forestry, however, which are favorable to the parceling off of the woodland into small estates, quite destroy the conception of the forest as we understand it.  An oak-forest like the above, which, as soon as the trees begin to grow really strong and sturdy, stretches forth toward the wanderer only slim, bark-stripped trunks with withered remnants of leaves, interspersed with rank miserable meadow-trees, with hazel-nut thickets and dog-rose bushes, a piece of woodland in which husbandry and forestry are completely jumbled, is actually no longer a real forest.  The most valuable kind of timber furnished by the massive trunks of the oaks and beeches and for which there is absolutely no substitute elsewhere—­this most specific treasure of the forest can be obtained only when the forest is managed by a rich corporation which can afford to wait a hundred years for the interest on its capital.

The olden times gauged correctly this aristocratic character of the forest when they chose it as a privileged exercise-ground where princes might take their amusement, and when they ennobled the chase; although, seen by the light of a philosophic student’s lamp, there is nothing very noble about it when a court, shining with the smoothest polish that civilization can give, withdraws from time to time into the barbarity of the primeval forest, and in faithful imitation of the rude life of the hunter spells out again, as it were, the first beginnings of civilization.  For no title did the German princes of the Empire struggle more bitterly than for that of “Master of the Imperial Hunt.”  On Frankish-German soil royalty put its centralizing power to the test first and most decisively in the establishment of royal forest preserves.  The king’s woods from that time on stood under a higher and more efficient protection than the Common Law could have afforded.  A more strikingly aristocratic prerogative than that of the forest preserves is inconceivable, and yet it is owing to this privilege that Germany still looks so green, that our mountains are not bare of trees like those of Italy, that country and people have not died off and dried up, that, in fine, such vast magnificent tracts of forest could, as a whole complete in itself, later pass over into the hands of the state.