92 EFFECT OF GAME LAWS—DESTRUCTION OF BIRDS. 
* * has filled all France with an intolerable cloud of sports¬ 
men. * * The declaration speaks of compensations and 
indemnities [to the seigneur s\ but the ungovernable populace 
takes advantage of the abolition of the game laws and laughs 
at the obligation imposed by the decree.” 
The French Revolution removed similar restrictions, with 
similar results, in other countries. The habits then formed 
have become hereditary on the Continent, and though game 
laws still exist in England, there is little doubt that the blind 
prejudices of the ignorant and half-educated classes in that 
country against birds are, in some degree, at least, due to a 
legislation, which, by restricting the chase of all game worth 
killing, drives the unprivileged sportsman to indemnify him¬ 
self by slaughtering all wild life which is not reserved for the 
amusement of his betters. Hence the lord of the manor buys 
his partridges and his hares by sacrificing the bread of his 
tenants, and so long as the farmers of Crawley are forbidden 
to follow higher game, they will suicidally revenge themselves 
by destroying the sparrows which protect their wdieatfields. 
On the Continent, and especially in Italy, the comparative 
scarcity and dearness of animal food combine with the feeling 
I have just mentioned to stimulate still further the destructive 
passions of the fowler. In the Tuscan province of Grosseto, 
containing less than 2,000 square miles, nearly 300,000 thrushes 
and other small birds are annually brought to market.* 
* Salvagnoli, Memorie mile Maremme Toscane , p. 143. The country 
about Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen or twenty feet high, which 
are a standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the fowlers 
who watch from them the flocks of small birds and drive them down in 
to the nets by throwing stones over them. 
Tschudi has collected in his little work, TJeber die Landwirthschaftliche 
Bedeutung der Vogel , many interesting facts respecting the utility of birds, 
and the wanton destruction of them in Italy and elsewhere. Not only the 
owl, but many other birds more familiarly known as predacious in their 
habits, are useful by destroying great numbers of mice and moles. The 
importance of this last service becomes strikingly apparent when it is 
known that the burrows of the mole are among the most frequent causes 
of rupture in the dikes of the Po, and, consequently, of inundations which 
