198 SMALL ANIMALS AND INSECTS. [Chap. Ij. 



tion for food, nnd of no other value. They do not even look upon poultry 

 in liny other light. Yet the truth is, poultry is worth ten times as much to 

 the farmer for the work of destruction it does upon his pests, as it is for the 

 food it aftbrds him. It is just so witli game birds ; and if the ownei-s of land 

 well situated for game preserves were able to preserve the birds, the culti- 

 vated portions might be benefited, and the owners could make the keeping 

 of wild birds as profitable as tame ones. 



From time to time laws have been devised and statutes enacted for the 

 preservation of game; but until recently such legislation lias been originated 

 by the wealthy men of cities, the men of the educated and leisure classes of tlie 

 community, the consumers and killers, not the feeders and possessors, of the 

 game or the owners of the acres. This has generally given to these statutes 

 tlie appearance, though in no degree the reality, of partaking of the odious 

 character of class legislation ; of being enacted for the benefit of the rich 

 against the poor, the proud against the humble, the men of leisure against 

 the men of labor. The farmers, who knew little and cared less for the game 

 which ran wild in their woods, fluttered in their tangled swamps, or screamed 

 over their boggy morasses, did not conceive how it coiild have any real value 

 in the eyes of any rational being ; regarded all legislation forbidding its 

 slaughter, except at stated periods, as a device cunningly framed for depriv- 

 ing theni of their own natural and indefeasible rights, and for giving amuse- 

 ment and gratification to finely-dressed, flashy strangers from the towns, 

 who came periodically into country places to break down fences, tramj^lo 

 under foot growing crops, and kill the game reared on the farmer's land, 

 which was, in its very nature, and from the mode of killing it, useless to the 

 farmer himself. In a word, they looked upon the Game Laws as an offensive, 

 aristocratic, unrepublican, European invention ; a sort of scheme for making 

 the rich richer, and the poor poorer — an idea sedulously encouraged by all 

 the brawling foreigners and pot-house village loafers, who, too lazy to work, 

 found their own profit in poaching a few starveling parent birds on the 

 nests, or half-grown fledgeling young fry on other men's lands, which they 

 miglit traffic or track away to railway conductors and stage-coacli drivers, 

 for transmission to the eating-houses of the cities. 



Gradually, however, they — the farmers, we mean — have come to open 

 their eyes on this question. The fearful increase of insect life, the prodigious 

 deterioration of the crops of all kinds, the threatened utter extinction of 

 some of the most valuable American staples in the very localities of whicli 

 they were formerly the pride and boast — as, for instance, the wheat ciop of 

 tlie famous Genesee A^alley, where it is already questionable, from the yearly 

 aggravated ravages of the Hessian-fly and the weevil, whether it is any 

 longer profitable, or perhaps prudent, to sow wheat — have forced them to 

 perceive that this growth and superabundance, daily and hourly aggravated 

 and exaggerated, of insect pests is to be attributed wholly to the unprece- 

 dented destruction of small birds. At the same time, the vast and hourly- 

 increasing demand for game in the large cities, the immense freights and 



