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 of the forest, etc., form a pretty exact instrument with which to measure the triumphant advance of the aristocratic or the democratic spirit. In the year 1848 many a vast tract of forest was sacrificed in order to purchase therewith a small fraction of popularity. Every revolution does harm to the forest, but, provided it does not wish to strangle itself, it leaves the field untouched.
After December 2, 1851, the gathering of fallen leaves in the forest was countenanced in Alsace in order to make the Napoleonic coup d' état popular. It was cleverly thought out; for the never-resting war about the forest can be for a government a mighty lever of influence on a class of the people which is, in general, hard enough to swing round. The concession permitting the gathering of leaves, and manhood suffrage, are one and the same act of shrewd Bonapartist policy, only aimed at different classes. Thus social politics lurks even behind the forest-trees and beneath the rustling red leaves of last autumn—a strange circle of cause and effect! The immoderate cultivation of potatoes contributes not a little to saddle the modern State with the proletariat, but this same cultivation of potatoes, which deprives the small peasant of straw, drives him into the forest to seek for withered leaves in place of straw for his cattle, and thus places again in the hands of the State authorities a means—based upon the strange historic ruin of our forest-franchises—of curbing a powerful part of the proletariat.
Popular sentiment in Germany considers the forest to be the one large piece of property which has not yet been completely portioned off. In contrast to field, meadow, and garden, every one has a certain right to the forest, even if it consists merely in being able to run about in it at pleasure. In the right, or the permission, to gather wood and dry leaves and to pasture cattle, in the distribution of the so-called "loose-wood" from the parish forests, and such acts, lie the historic foundation of an almost communist tradition. Where else has anything of the kind been perpetuated except in the case of the forest? The latter is the root of truly German social conditions. In very truth the forest, with us, has not yet been completely portioned off; therefore every political agitator who wishes to pay out in advance to the people a little bit of "prosperity" as earnest-money of the promised universal prosperity, immediately lays hands upon the forest. By means of the forest, and by no other, you can substantially preach communism to the German peasant. It is well known that the idea of the forest as private property was introduced at a late date and gained ground gradually among the German people.
Forest, pasturage, water, are, in accordance with a primitive German principle of jurisprudence, intended for the common use of all inhabitants of the same district. The old alliteration "wood, wold and water," has not yet been entirely forgotten by the people. Thus a dim and feeble memory, a well-nigh forgotten legend, looking upon the common claim to general use of the forest as a natural right which had been in force since the beginning of time, confirms the conclusions of the historian, according to whom community of possession of the forest was a true old Germanic idea. Such a line of argument, however, could also bring us to the further conclusion that this community of possession has only once been fully realized—namely, by and in the primeval forest.
In times of excitement men have worked out on paper wonderful arithmetical problems concerning the partition of the soil of the forest into small plots of ground for the poor. Paper is very forbearing, and it looks very idyllic and comfortable to see, carefully calculated before our eyes, how many hundreds of dear little estates could be made out of the meagre soil of the forest, on which the proletarian could settle down to the contented patriarchal existence of a farmer. Practical attempts along this line have not been wanting, but, instead of diminishing the proletariat, such an increase of small farms only served to augment it all the more; practice is ahead of theory. The people should have thanked God that the forest, almost alone, had not been parceled out; yet, instead, they were ready even to destroy the forest in order to assist the small farmer! In many parts of Germany the poor farmer would starve if the traditional free use of the forest did not form a steady annuity for him. The forest helps in a hundred ways to place the petty farms on a solid foundation; if, therefore, men destroy the forests in order to increase the number of petty farms, they are undermining firmly rooted existences in order, in their place, to plant new ones upon the sand.
It is a source of great comfort for the social politician that, in Germany, the contrast of forest and field yet remains so generally established that we still have a whole group of regular forest lands. A nation which still holds fast to the forest as a common public possession along with the field that is divided off into private property, has not only a present but also a future. Thus in Russia's impenetrable forests, whose inner thickets are, in the words of the poet Mickiewicz, such a deep mystery that they are as little known to the eye of-the huntsman as the depths of the sea are known to the eve of the fisherman—in these forests is hidden the future of the great Slav Empire; while in the English and French provinces, where there is no longer a genuine forest, we are confronted by an already partially extinct national life. The United States of America whose society is permeated with materialism, and whose strange national life is made up of a mixture of youthful energy and of torpor, would rapidly hurry on to their destruction if they did not have in the background the primeval forest which is raising up a fresher, more vigorous, race to take the place of the rapidly degenerating inhabitants of the coast-lands. The wilderness is an immense dormant capital in ready cash, possessing which as a basis the North Americans may, for a long time to come, risk the most daring social and political stock-jobbing. But woe to them should they consume the capital itself!
The German forest and the privileges and compulsory service connected with it are a last surviving fragment of the Middle Ages. Nowhere are the ruins of the feudal elements more plainly visible than in the forest regulations; the forest alone assures the rural population—in true medieval style—a subsidy for its existence, untouched by the fury of competition and small-farming.
Therefore do the demagogues so often try to change the war "about" the forest into a war "against" the forest; they know that the forest must first be hewn down before the Middle Ages can be wiped out of Germany, and, on that account, the forest always fares worse than anything else in every popular uprising. For though in our rapidly moving century there is an average interval of fifteen years allowed between one revolution and another, yet a good forest tree requires a much longer time to reach full growth. At least the incalculable loss suffered by our forest property in the year 1848, through lavish waste, plundering, and wanton ruination, has certainly, up to the present time, not been made good by natural means.
In Anhalt-Dessau it was decided, in an ordinance of the year 1852, that all oak-trees standing on private ground should, in accordance with ancient custom, remain the property of the sovereign. In this conception the contrast between forest and field is an absolutely ideal one; even the separate forest tree is in itself still a forest and has forest-rights, just as in localities where all the forests have been cut down the peasants still frequently designate a single remaining tree by the title of their "parish forest."