THE STAG : THE INVENTOR. 
215 
the brocket become the ten prong, attaining fat and weight with 
age. 
On sleuth-hounds and whippers in ! jSTo more rest to the beast : 
— his horns to the rack, his flesh to the smoke-house. 
It is to come to this pass that the noble animal has every year 
re-formed his head, whose weight at last retards his pace. Unfruit- 
ful work, like that of the inventor, obliged each year to recom- 
mence his task without being able to conquer the misery in which 
the oppression of idle capital — the oppression of the privileged 
class invincibly holds him. Laborers — accursed class — it is writ- 
ten in the English Bible and Gospel — in the commentaries of John- 
Baptist Say, and of Saint Malthus, that you shall perish at your task ; 
that the product of your sweats rightly belongs to your masters. 
Bend your brows under the law of the strongest ; submit to the 
decree of destiny : then the victims, discouraged by the futilit}^ of 
their efforts, resign themselves, or ask of drunkenness the momenta- 
ry oblivion of their evils and of their future. Then the apostles of false 
morality, born upholders of privilege, and the poor slaves of the shop, 
— the economists ; take their texts from the brutality in which the tri- 
umph of their doctrines has mired their victims, to thunder against 
the innate immorality of the working classes. Then the prefect of 
the Oise issues his decree that the stag and the roebuck are to be 
ranked in the category of pernicious creatures ! 
Because the poor beasts to which so few pleasures are granted 
in this world in return for so many sufferings ; because the stag, 
the fallow deer, and the .roebuck greedily browze in the spring 
upon the shoots of the young oaks which give them a temporary 
exhilaration — a moment of careless gayety, too often expiated by a 
terrible punishment for this single weakness. 
Covetous proprietors of forests, unfeeling administrators, have 
declared the three innocent species duly attainted and convicted 
of this original sin of intoxication. Thus speak the Puritan minis- 
ters of England, of the Irish and Saxon proletaries, a despicable 
crowd, imbued with every vice. 
Because the stag furiously seeks to forget his numerous vexa- 
tions in the distractions of love, they have accused him of licen- 
tiousness and immodesty ; as if privation and misery were not le- 
