516 
GOVERNMENT WORKS. 
tion of the dikes of the Netherlands, their labors are the first 
deliberate and direct attempts of man to make himself, on a 
great scale, a geographical power, to restore natural balances 
which earlier generations had disturbed, and to atone, by acts 
guided by foreseeing and settled purpose, for the waste which 
thoughtless improvidence had created. 
1 
Government Works. 
There is an important political difference between these lat¬ 
ter works and the diking system of the Netherlandish and 
German coasts. The dikes originally were, and in modern 
times very generally have been, private enterprises, undertaken 
with no other aim than to add a certain quantity of cultivable 
soil to the former possessions of their proprietor, or sometimes 
of the state. In short, with few exceptions, they have been 
merely a pecuniary investment, a mode of acquiring land not 
economically different from purchase. The planting of the 
dunes, on the contrary, has always been a public work, executed^ 
not with the expectation of reaping a regular direct percentage 
of income from the expenditure, but dictated by higher views 
of state economy—by the same governmental principles, in 
fact, which animate all commonwealths in repelling invasion 
by hostile armies, or in repairing the damages that invading 
forces may have inflicted on the general interests of the people. 
The restoration of the forests in the southern part of France, 
as now conducted by the Government of that empire, is a 
measure of the same elevated character as the fixing of the 
dunes. In former ages, forests were formed or protected sim¬ 
ply for the sake of the shelter they afforded to game, or for 
the timber they yielded ; but the recent legislation of France, 
and of some other Continental countries, on this subject, looks 
to more distant as well as nobler ends, and these are among 1 
the public acts which most strongly encourage the hope that 
the rulers of Christendom are coming better to understand the 
true duties and interests of civilized government. 
