109 



" When such evils reach the stage of common danger, and this is in a great 

 measure already the case, it then becomes a duty to interfere by legislation. 

 Neither the decrease of the wood production nor the difficulty at times to meet 

 the demand for wood, nor the rise in the price can confer upon the State the 

 right to interfere with the freedom of private ownership or of private adminis- 

 tration of forests, but this right and duty would devolve upon the State in case 

 that any injury is done to the welfare and existence of the inhabitants of a cer- 

 tain locality resulting from the destruction of the forest. How entire districts 

 which flourished in the past have been reduced to poverty and want through 

 forest destruction, has been seen in Prussia, where large tracts of land^s have suf- 

 fered under such calamities. 



" By stripping the beeches of their forests in the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries, the sea coasts have become exposed to all winds and storms. Fields, 

 once fertile, have been transformed into waste sand dunes, and whole villages, 

 whose agricultural people formerly prospered, have ceased to exist. 



" In the middle and eastern Provinces light and undulating soil has been 

 replaced by small or large sand hills, and places where forests once stood and 

 served to carry off stagnant moisture, have been turned into marshes. In the 

 western mountainous Provinces the fertile forest soil, the waste product of thou- 

 sands of years of the trees, has disappeared. It has been dried up by the sun 

 and wind, and washed into the valleys by rain and snow-water, and left the 

 mountains bare and unfertile, whose soil is scarcely capable of supporting any 

 vegetation save heath and broom-grass. 



" The rich meadows in the valleys have vanished, they have been again and 

 again, after every rainstorm, washed and torn by the water rushing from the 

 mountain tops. The high moors which have been formed by the destruction of 

 the forest, emit at all times of the year vapors and fogs which kill vegetation 

 far into the land. Thus the soil becomes directly impoverished, and the climatic 

 conditions change and become worse. Instances of the injurious effect upon the 

 culture of the soil caused by the destruction of the forests can be seen to a smaller 

 or larger extent throughout Prussia." 



A BRIEF RETROSPECT. 



Early in the fourteenth century, in the more thickly populated sections 01 

 Switzerland, the people appear to have been forced, through apprehension of a 

 deficiency in their wood supply, to take some measures for the preservation of 

 their forests. In the year 1314 Zurich forbade its foresters (vorsters) to " fell, 

 raft or sell wood from the Sihlwald." In 1339 Schwyz issued a prohibition 

 against charcoal burning, and in 1438 Freiburg decreed that no wood should be 

 cut in the environs of the city. In Entlebuch it was forbidden in 1471 " to draw- 

 wood from forests situated high up in the mountains," and in 1592 Berne called 

 attention to the need of economy in the use of wood. Finally similar decrees 

 became general, but while serving to preserve forest areas they proved a hindrance 

 to the progress of agricultural and vine-growing interests. Zurich, for instance, 

 in 1563, forbade the establishment of any new vineyards, and the prohibition 

 was kept in force up to the beginning of the eighteenth century. At that period 

 the dread of a deficiency of wood became so general that it was even forbidden 

 to purvey or export any of it from one village to another. Contemporaneously 

 with these prohibitions were issued others forbidding the pasturage of cattle, 

 sheep and goats in the forests. The old law generally ran in some such homely 

 text as this : Whoever keeps a cow at home in summer is allowed to drive no 

 goats, and nCbody more than he actually requires for his house-keeping. 



