Restrictions of Forest Use. 117 



7. Forest Policy. 



During the first half of the century the old concep- 

 tion of Forsthoheit — superior right of the princes to' 

 supervise and interfere with private property — changed 

 into the more modern conception of the police function 

 of the state, and by 1850, after the revolutionary period, 

 the seignorage of the princes had passed away. The 

 issue of forest ordinances (the last in 1840) was re- 

 placed by the enactment of forest laws which, since the 

 establishment of representative government, has become 

 a duty of the legislators. 



The tendency to restrict the exercise of private prop- 

 erty rights had been assailed by the theories of Laissez 

 faire and the teachings of Adam Smith, and as a conse- 

 quence all the restrictive mandates of the older forest 

 ordinances had' been weakened and had more or less 

 fallen into disuse. Especially the attempts to influence 

 prices and markets had nearly if not entirely vanished 

 during the first decade. Only for the state forest it was 

 still thought desirable to predetermine prices, or at least 

 keep to low rates, because wood was a necessary ma- 

 terial for the industries. This theory prevailed until, 

 perhaps under the lead of Hundeshagen (see above), the 

 propriety of securing the highest soil rent was recognized 

 as the proper aim, when the practice of selling wood at 

 auction in order to secure the best prices became the rule. 



The regulations of export and import between the 

 different States, which had been enacted \mder the mer- 

 cantilistic teachings of the last century (see page 49), 

 and the many local tariffs which impeded a free ex- 

 change of commodities, lasted for a long while and were 

 not all abolished until 1865, when under the lead of 



