Reform in Forestry Methods 229 



approached. Many of the rulers of the multitude of 

 small communities into which Germany was divided, 

 and who treated their dominions very much as a 

 man would his private estates, had rather expensive 

 tastes, and found that they must either retrench or 

 increase their revenues. When the ability of their 

 subjects to pay taxes was exhausted, they turned to 

 the large forests, which most of them possessed, in 

 order to replenish their coffers, and their advisers 

 usually had sense enough to see that one could 

 increase the productivity of the forests without 

 destroying them. When fifty years later most of 

 these princelings were mediatized, the larger por- 

 tion of their forests became the property of the 

 greater states of which their territories were made 

 parts, and formed the nucleus of the magnificent 

 system of state forests Germany enjoys to-day. 

 On the other hand, the abler statesmen of the 

 eighteenth century saw that there was danger of 

 the supply of lumber and fire-wood, — ^which latter 

 was then of much more importance than now, — fall- 

 ing behind the demand and prices rising excessively. 

 So they thought of ways to increase the productiv- 

 ity of forests and prevent their destruction. Thus 

 both the greed of the bad rulers and the foresight 

 of good ones caused the adoption of rational 

 forestry methods. 



The fact that in the United States the first im- 

 pulse towards forestry reform has not come from 

 the owners and exploiters, nor from economists or 

 statesmen, but from people who had a scientific or 



