Curiously enough, wood on the stump is still not considered property in the same sense as other things, so far as theft is concerned; the stealing of growing timber is not even called theft, the word used in the laws being _Frevel_ (tort), and, like other infractions against forest laws, it is punished by a money fine, more or less in proportion to the value of the stolen material or the damage suffered. This money fine may be transmuted into imprisonment or forest labor, but corporal punishment, which still prevailed in the first decades of the century, has been abolished. Wood stealing was very general and rampant during the beginning of the century, but improvement in the condition of the country population and in the number and personnel of the forest officers since 1850 has now reduced it to a minimum. Formerly, and until 1848, the administrators and even the forest owners acted at the same time as prosecutor, judge and executioner, and only in 1879, was this condition everywhere and entirely changed, and infractions against forest laws adjudged by regular courts of law, holding meetings at stated times for the prosecution of such infractions. Nevertheless, the court proceedings in forest matters still vary from the usual court practice, providing a simpler, cheaper and more ready disposal of testimony and witnesses, and quicker retribution, which is largely rendered possible through having every forest officer under oath as a sheriff, and his statement, and perhaps the confiscated tools employed in the theft, being accepted as _prima facie_ evidence of the infraction. The social position of the underforesters and the forest protective service has also been improved until all charges of incompetency and immorality, which were not undeserved even until past the middle of the nineteenth century, have become reversed; the forest service being morally on as high a plane as all the departments of German administrations. 7. _Forest Policy._ During the first half of the century the old conception 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 replaced by the enactment of forest laws which, since the establishment of representative government, has become a function of legislatures.