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.

This aristocratic love of the forest, however, went hand in hand with
the forest-tyranny of the Middle Ages. The forest-trees and the game
were treated with more consideration than the corn-fields and the
peasants. When a cruel master wished to punish a peasant