256 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
model society, already rendered illustrious by the discoveries of 
morphine and of prussic acid, will soon be obliged to pronounce 
the absolute interdiction of arsenic, from the urgent necessity of 
protecting the existence of wearisome husbands and of fathers too 
tenacious of life, against the scandalous abuses that unappreciated 
wives, and children in a hurry to enjoy, make of this powder. 
But follow me into England, the country of the representative, 
and of political economy. They have exterminated the wolf in 
England ; there the result is attained. Now do you think that 
after the wolves are destroyed there remains for each a larger share 
of mutton? Listen. We read in the official reports of the gov- 
ernment that the laborers of Great Britain are attacked during 
three or four months in the year with a singular disease, a malady 
whose symptoms disappear as soon as food is given to the sich ! 
We read that during the single winter of 1846 and ^47 nearly a 
million of Irish died of hunger. How very efficacious the exter- 
mination of the wolves has proved here ! 
Alas ! not only has the extermination of the wolves made no 
larger share of mutton for the people, but even the prosperity of 
the sheep has become a dreadful cause of distress to the laborer 
of Britain. 
One day when the Duke of Sutherland had been reading, un- 
derstandingly, the book of a French economist, Jean Baptiste Say, 
in which book it is written that the whole science of political 
economy consists in obtaining the largest possible revenue from a 
given capital, the largest clear revenue, the idea suddenly occurred 
to this holy and worthy man to apply this charitable theory to his 
domains in Scotland. And as his overseers had proved to him 
that the sheep, which' cost much less than men for food and lodg- 
ing, bring in much more in clear profit, his lordship had the farm- 
steads on his place pulled down, and his fields transformed into 
pastures, and the unfortunate peasantry who had hitherto found 
on these lands occupations and a livelihood, were inhumanly 
chased from them, and have gone to swell the crowd of vaga- 
bonds in cities. 
Now the invasion of all the wolves of Russia and Sweden could 
not have caused the rural population half the distress that the in- 
