THE CHASE, SOURCE OF NATIONAL LIBERTIES. 19 
let the law bring back these savages into France, and before six 
months they will figure on the benches of the Court of Assizes as 
robbers of game, perhaps even as murderers. 
[It is to the element of spontaneity that the healthfulness of the 
naturalist’s pursuits are due. — Tr.] 
Switzerland was emancipated from the Austrian yoke by the ad- 
dress of a hunter well known on the scenery of the opera. Switz- 
erland owed its political liberty, amid twenty nations enslaved, only 
to the superior skill of its natives as marksmen, a superiority sus- 
tained by the continuous exercise of the right of the chase. But 
shame now to that odious branch establishment of Judah, that pours 
forth every year clouds of rapacious stock-jobbers upon all the Euro- 
pean capitals ! shame to the country of renegades, that trains its chil- 
dren to the trade of executioners’ servants, and furnishes jailors and 
police to all the tyrants of Italy ! Revered shades of William Tell, 
Melchtal, and Arnold, it is your indignation that exhales by my 
mouth, to wither with a bloody curse those vile sustainers of abso- 
lutism, your degenerate sons ! Oppression never approached the 
mountains of Navarre and of Biscay, peopled with bear-hunters. 
There is an order of peasants in Sweden, because the peasants have 
always had the right to hunt in Sweden. The Scotch, the Arnaut, 
the Kabaile, all the last conquered of nations, are hunting people. 
The Klepthe, who for all his worldly chattels has but a good gun, 
bronzed by the smoke, and then his liberty upon the mountains, the 
Klepthe has finished by getting the better of the Turk, France and 
Russia assisting. The apogee of power for this same Turk corre- 
sponds to the epoch when the soldiers of this nation were the first 
bombardiers of the world, when the conquering sultans took 
along with them packs of six hundred dogs with collars of vermilion. 
Those noble and daring mountaineers of the Caucasus, who sus- 
tain a war so poetic, so embroidered with romantic incidents, against 
the Russian colossus, pass for the most skillful marksmen in the 
five parts of the globe. The Circassian only fires from horseback ; 
his target is a hat thrown into the air at a hundred yards distance. 
I have heard that this same emperor of Russia, who naturally 
