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.
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