20 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
desires, like an intelligent despot, to emancipate his subjects from 
the yoke of the nobility, •willingly grants them the right of hunting. 
If it is thus, the Muscovite people is nearer to its liberty than is 
supposed. 
Why has India been so often ravaged and conquered ? Because 
the religion of Brama forbids to shed the blood of beasts, e., inter- 
dicts the hunt. The English people, the most voracious people of 
prey that has ever been known, would not now hold the Ganges and 
Indus in its nets had there been yonder only ten thousand good 
marksmen to bar the way against it. The Americans of the Union 
were not a hundred millions, and more, like the natives of the dou- 
ble Asiatic peninsula, they were only from two to three millions, 
counting women and children, which has not prevented them from 
very readily showing the English out at their door. It is because 
all the Americans knew how to handle the fowling-piece, and that 
France helped them. I am proud of being a Frenchman, when I 
see the heroes of my country run to the aid of all the peoples who 
wish to free themselves : Americans, Poles, Greeks, Belgians, or Irish. 
The Irish, those famished Helots of Britannic Sparta, supply 
another formidable argument in support of this invincible theory, 
that the fear of the fowling-piece is the surest guarantee of inviola- 
bility to the rights and territories of a people. The Irish race has 
become the most crushed and the easiest to be crushed in Europe, 
on account of having remained for whole ages a stranger to the use 
of the fowling-piece. It is not the 'M'epeal” that will save the chil- 
dren of Green Erin from the anguish of hunger, and the voracity 
of the English minotaur. Let all those who still partake the sad 
illusions of O’Connell take note of this ; the safety of Ireland lies 
in the conquest of the right of the chase (and the reinvestiture of 
the people with this and the other rights usurped and monopolized 
by their landlords). Scatter a hundred thousand fowling-pieces 
over Ireland, with a little apprenticeship in the manner of using 
them, and I may see, within ten years, the pearl of the seas rise 
resplendent from the abyss ; otherwise not. Alas ! the English 
lord knows as well as I do, and long before me, the secret of Ire- 
land’s safety ; thus he may accord the repeal,” but never the right 
of hunting. 
