was burnt down in order, with each day's quota of burned forest,
to extort the concession of a new "popular demand." The old legend of
the "War about the Forest" had become, once more, really live history.

And this eternal trouble-maker, the forest, which, however, as we have
noticed, always gets the worst of it in every disturbance, is at the
same time a powerful safeguard for historic customs. Under its
protection not only an ancient nationality but also the oldest remains
of historic monuments have been preserved to us. Many of the most
remarkable old names have been retained for us in the appellations of
the forest districts. When German philology has finished investigating
the names of villages and cities, it will turn to the names of the
forest districts--which, for the most part, have changed far less than
those of the districts of the plain--as to a new and rich source of
knowledge. It is almost without exception under the shelter of the
forest-thickets that have been conserved until the present day the
town-walls of the nations which, in prehistoric times, occupied our
provinces, as well as the graves and sacrificial places of our
forefathers, which are our oldest monuments. And while, in the name of a
purely manufacturing civilization, it has been proposed to destroy our
German forests, they alone have guarded for us in their shade the
earliest speaking witnesses of national industry. In the
mountain-forests of the middle Rhine one often finds large dross-heaps
on sequestered hill tops, far from brooks and water courses. These are
the places where stood the primeval "forest smithies," whose forges were
perhaps worked with the hand or the foot, and of which our heroic
legends sing; these are the scenes of the first rude beginnings of our
iron industry which, since then, has developed so mightily. Thus the
oldest information that we possess on the subject of our German
manufacturing industry starts, like our entire civilization, in the
forest.

For centuries it was fitting that progress should advocate exclusively
the rights of the field; now, however, it is fitting that progress
should advocate the rights of the wilderness _together with_ the rights
of the cultivated land. And no matter how much the political economist
may oppose and rebel against this fact, the folk-lorist economist must
persevere, in spite of him, and fight also for the rights of the
wilderness.

THE EYE FOR NATURAL SCENERY[13]