rried on in a small way, that is to say, in so far as it
shall be exclusively operated so as to obtain the largest possible
income out of the smallest possible capital and with the shortest
possible delay, the forest loses its historic stamp, its cultural
influence on the social and esthetic education of the nation, and on the
characteristic distinctions of society.

Germany is not separated into field and woodland in such a manner that
one part is dedicated almost exclusively to forestry and the other part
to agriculture. Rather does the contrast between field and forest exist
everywhere; it interferes with the natural division into mountainous and
flat country, and thus divides and subdivides the soil of the entire
German empire in a fashion of which no other country of Europe can
boast. In addition, agriculture and forestry are present in every
legitimate form possible. On German soil the whole scale is run through,
and we have the most variegated examples all the way from
spade-husbandry up to the largest private estates; in the forms of our
forest economy we are much more divided than in the forms of our
political economy. This unexampled multiplicity of ways of cultivating
the soil is not only typical of the wonderfully rich organization of
our social conditions, but it also furnishes the most natural basis for
the peculiar suppleness, many-sidedness, and receptivity of German
mental-culture and civilization.

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