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.
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