ultivation of our soil.

In Germany this contrast still exists in all its sharpness, as we still
have a real forest. England, on the contrary, has practically no really
free forest left--no forest which has any social significance. This, of
necessity, occasions at the very outset a number of the clearest
distinctions between German and English nationality.

In every decisive popular movement in Germany the forest is the first to
suffer. A large part of the peasants live in continual secret feud with
the masters of the forest and their privileges; no sooner is a spark of
revolution lighted, then, before everything else, there flares up among
these people "the war about the forest." The insurgent rural proletariat
can raise no barricades, can tear down no royal palaces, but, instead,
lay waste the woodland of their masters; for in their eyes this forest
is the fortress of the great lord in comparison with the little
unprotected plot of ground of the small farmer. As soon as the power of
the State has conquered the rebellious masses, the first thing it
proceeds to do is to restore the forest to its former condition and
again to put in force the forest charters which had been torn up. This
spectacle, modified in accordance with the spirit of the age, repeats
itself in every century of our history, and it will no doubt be of
constant recurrence, always in new forms, for centuries to come.

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