54 EFFECTS OF FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
ive) 
rible scourge of agriculture is the abundance of wild game, 
a consequence of the privileges of the chase; the fields are 
wasted, the forests ruined, and the vines gnawed down to the 
roots.” 
Lifects of the French Leevolution. 
The abrogation of the game laws and of the harsh provisions 
of the forestal code was one of the earliest measures of the 
revolutionary government; and the removal of the ancient 
restrictions on the chase and of the severe penalties imposed on 
trespassers upon the public forests, was immediately followed by - 
unbridled license in the enjoyment of the newly conceded 
rights. 
In the popular mind the forest was associated with all the 
abuses of feudalism, and the evils the peasantry had suffered 
from the legislation which protected both it and the game it 
sheltered, blinded them to the still greater physical mischiefs 
which its destruction was to entail upon them. No longer 
under the safeguard of the law, the crown forests and those of 
the great lords were attacked with relentless fury, unscrupu- 
lously plundered and wantonly laid waste, and even the rights 
of property in small private woods ceased to be respected.* 
Various absurd theories, some of which are not even yet 
exploded, were propagated with regard to the economical 
advantages of converting the forest into pasture and plongh- 
land, the injurious effects of the woods upon climate, health, 
facility of internal communication, and the like. Thus resent- 
ful memory of the wrongs associated with the forest, popular 
ignorance, and the cupidity of speculators cunning enough to 
* “Whole trees were sacrificed for the most insignificant purposes; the 
peasants would cut down two firs to make a single pair of wooden shoes.”— 
MictELET, as quoted by CLAV&. Etudes, p. 24. 
A similar wastefulness formerly prevailed in Russia, though not from the 
sime cause. It St. Pierre’s time, the planks brought to St. Petersburg were 
not sawn, but hewn with the axe, and a tree furnished but a single plank. 
