LYMBIC PLAGUES OF THE CHASE. 
39 
woodpeckers and the tomtits, have gnawed the pith of the large 
trees, and devoured their leaves, and the vegetation of the forests 
and orchards has suffered incalculable damage. The destruction 
of the linnet has delivered the vine to the invasion of the pyrale. 
The game destroyed ; an important source of nourishment, whose 
keeping cost man nothing, has been taken away from the French 
people, and this game has become the privilege of the tables of 
the rich, and the exaggerated increase of its price has urged the 
field laborer to leave his plow and to become a poacher ; and there 
have followed lawsuits, hatreds, and murders, and the necessity of 
increasing the onerous and unproductive body of repressive agents ; 
and another grief has been added to the troubles of the proletary, 
who has asked by what right the proprietor sought to appropriate 
to himself alone, all the game that he has not created, and that 
God gives to all. And as cunning, theft, fraud, and lying are the 
natural arms of the slave; of the child, whose natural inclinations 
false morality repels ; of woman, who is made to swear oaths she 
cannot keep ; of the proletary, who can take no part in making 
tlie law^s which are enacted against him ; the poacher retaliates, by 
the snare and the night-watch, on the theory of the absolute right 
of property; and his rebellion, which is sustained bya just princi- 
ple, keeps up a fearful fermentation of ruin in the midst of society. 
With the last century has perished that aristocracy of race, 
whose titles of nobility our fathers one day threv/ into the river; 
but upon its ruins another has lisen — the aristocracy of money — 
greedier, pi-ouder, less well-bred than its predecessor, and less 
brave ; and which dishonors the hunt by selling its game. The 
banker, who values his game according to the money he makes off 
of it ; the banker and the English poacher, who pullulate in France, 
and regard this country as a conquered land since 1830 ; the banker, 
I say, and the English poacher, figure honorably in the category 
of the lyrabic plagues of the chase, under the title of oppression. 
As to carnage, it is the only art in which the civilized hunter is 
a graduated master. For the civilized hunter, the game has no 
sex, and season no laws. If, however, the worship of destruction 
had altars among us, our prefects would be rightfully its high 
priests. Had the prefects been created and sent into the world to 
