dugibd's pro jet de boisement. 63 



it is for the interest of the State to give to these operations the greatest 

 extension possible, 



" It is also necessary that the State should recover the advances which it 

 will have made for the construction of dykes. And it will find the means of 

 liquidating the amount sunk in the work, first, in the profit calculated 

 above, as resulting from the 50 centime augmentation of impost on the land 

 as wooded, and further, in the proprietorship of a certain portion of the 

 lands acquired. As it will have furnished the half of the expense to which 

 the acquisition owes its existence, it is just that it should obtain possession of 

 half of the lands acquired." 



M. SureU says, — " Such is the system developed by M. Dugied in his 

 Memoir Sur le Boisement des Basses Alpes. This work produced no fruit. 

 It did not for one moment stop the abuse. The Administration is not yet 

 aroused from its indifference ; and the devastation of the torrents, and the 

 miseries which this brings in its train, and the daily progressive ruin of 

 the country, go on stUl, as in the past, before unpitying eyes. 



" The efforts of M. Dugied have been but little appreciated ; and the 

 country, in favour of which he was the first to raise his voice, has not been 

 more just in regard to him than was the Administration of the Eestoration 

 which deposed him from the prefecture of the Basses Alpes, which he had 

 not occupied more than a year, and where he would probably have rendered 

 eminent services to the country. His • work has called forth ridiculing 

 criticisms. They have referred the execution of his project to the Princes 

 of the Arabian Night Entertainments. I must confess that the extravagancies 

 of the project of M. Dugied has entirely escaped me. I only see in it an 

 operation, sufficiently simple at bottom, which could not fail to develope, on 

 a vast scale, what is practised every day by private parties ; an operation, 

 the execution of which is evidently possible, and the expense of which has 

 nothing surprising in it when I compare it with those which the Administra- 

 tion entrusts every year to the engineer of the smallest arrondissement. 

 Certainly, it would read as a romance, much more extravagant than the 

 alleged palingenesique romance of M. Dugied, if one would turn over the 

 leaves, mastering the same, of the report of the 120,000,000 francs worth 

 of works executed every year, on all the bridges of France, under the 

 Direction des pouts et ckaussees/ This speaks of the sea imprisoned in harbours, 

 roads tunnelled through rocks, rivers confined by embankments or by 

 bridges, lighthouses erected on rocks in the midst of tempests, canals trans- 

 porting boats across the summit of mountains. I see in these works, 

 works more difficult, more costly, and more marvellous by far, than the 

 rehoisement of some nooks of mountains. And if any come to discuss in 

 the Chamber seriously, and like people who are ready to put hand to 

 the work, the enormous budget of a milliard and a half, which certain 

 economists teU us to be necessary for the establishment of a complete net- 

 work of railways, what will be thought of this other prodigy, which was 

 held to be only fabulous not more than thirty years ago ? When we shall 

 have multipUed by ten, or by a hundred, the figures given by M. Dugied, 

 we shall not yet have come to expenses Uke to those of a great number of 

 our public works, which are ten times — or, for that matter, a hundred times 

 — less useful, and which do not frighten us, accustomed as we are, for a long 

 time, to open our purses for their execution. 



" Will any one undertake seriously to deny the possibility of the rehoise- 

 ment proposed by M. Dugied ? . . The proofs which have established 



