THE DEER AND ITS EXTERMINATORS. 
217 
branches of the firs or hemlock, thence to fall down on the prey 
whose passage they watch. The bear has always been more 
dainty of strawberries and honey than of flesh ; the stag and his 
congenera have rarely had to complain of him. I am not sorry to 
find in passing an occasion of bestowing this new certificate of 
good life and morals to a beast too much calumniated. 
Innumerable herds of deer were scattered over the soil of the 
prairies and forests of North America before the fairy of industry 
had with a touch of her magic wand transformed the desert and 
the solitude into populous cities, and planted the custom-houses 
of trade among those swampy shores where musky alligators once 
slept in the sun. The deer then constituted the whole fund of social 
wealth, the whole capital of the red skins, from the left bank of 
the Mississippi to the Atlantic — as the bison that of the red skins 
of the West, from the other bank of that river to the Rocky 
Mountains. It was their manna of the desert— their resource 
against hunger, the normal punishment of the savage state. The 
civilized European, that being beset with the passion to grasp all 
and destroy all ; at the sight of all this natural riches, took no heed 
to spare aught. Exterminators came from all sides to make war 
on the deer and the bison, and these species would not have out- 
lasted one century, had not the spirit of conservatism, inherent to' 
property, at last whispered a reasonable idea into the ear of the 
Yankees. These inveterate destroyers one day perceived that 
they were not the only ones at the death of the deer, but that the 
wolf and the panther were active competitors with them. They 
then declared war to the death — -the war of competition against 
these, and the battle still lasts, while the deer has gained largely 
from this diversion of forces. The stag has played a groat part in 
the pleasures of the kings and nobility of France, hereditary hunters, 
who have consecrated their evenings to studies of the chase. But if 
it had fine days under the old monarchy, it has fallen along with it, 
dearly expiating its royal friendships. In 1789, as since in 1830, it 
was the first innocent victim on which the wrath of the people fell, 
Quidqitid delirant reges plectuntur Cervix the poet should have 
said, and not Achivi ; for it is certain that the people have less to 
siiflfer from revolutions than the deer. 
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