Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruyère the following striking picture of the condition of the French peasantry in his time: "One sees certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scattered over the country and attached to the soil, which they root and turn over with indomitable perseverance. They have, as it were, an articulate voice, and when they rise to their feet, they show a human face. They are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the labor of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting, and therefore deserve some small share of the bread they have grown." "These are his own words," adds Courier; "he is speaking of the fortunate peasants, of those who had work and bread, and they were then the few."—Pétition à la Chambre des Députís pour les Villageois que l'on empêche de danser.
Arthur Young, who travelled in France from 1787 to 1789, gives, in the twenty-first chapter of his Travels, a frightful account of the burdens of the rural population even at that late period. Besides the regular governmental taxes, and a multitude of heavy fines imposed for trifling offences, he enumerates about thirty seignorial rights, the very origin and nature of some of which are now unknown, while those of some others, claimed and enforced by ecclesiastical as well as by temporal lords, are as repulsive to humanity and morality, as the worst abuses ever practised by heathen despotism. Most of these, indeed, had been commuted for money payments, and were levied on the peasantry as pecuniary imposts for the benefit of prelates and lay lords, who, by virtue of their nobility, were exempt from taxation. Who can wonder at the hostility of the French plebeian classes toward the aristocracy in the days of the Revolution?
[2] The temporary depopulation of an exhausted soil may be, in some cases, a physical, though, like fallows in agriculture, a dear-bought advantage. Under favorable circumstances, the withdrawal of man and his flocks allows the earth to clothe itself again with forests, and in a few generations to recover its ancient productiveness. In the Middle Ages, worn-out fields were depopulated, in many parts of the Continent, by civil and ecclesiastical tyrannies, which insisted on the surrender of the half of a loaf already too small to sustain its producer. Thus abandoned, these lands often relapsed into the forest state, and, some centuries later, were again brought under cultivation with renovated fertility.
[3] The subject of climatic change, with and without reference to human action as a cause, has been much discussed by Moreau de Jonnes, Dureau, de la Malle, Arago, Humboldt, Fuster, Gasparin, Becquerel, and many other writers in Europe, and by Noah Webster, Forry, Drake, and others in America. Fraas has endeavored to show, by the history of vegetation in Greece, not merely that clearing and cultivation have affected climate, but that change of climate has essentially modified the character of vegetable life. See his Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit.
Gods Almagt wenkte van den troon,
En schiep elk volk een land ter woon:
Hier vestte Zij een grondgebied,
Dat Zij ons zelven scheppen liet.
[5] The udometric measurements of Belgrand, reported in the Annales Forestières for 1854, and discussed by Vallès in chap. vi of his Études sur les Inondations, constitute the earliest, and, in some respects, the most remarkable series known to me, of persevering and systematic observations bearing directly and exclusively upon the influence of human action on climate, or, to speak more accurately, on precipitation and natural drainage. The conclusions of Belgrand, however, and of Vallès, who adopts them, have not been generally accepted by the scientific world, and they seem to have been, in part at least, refuted by the arguments of Héricourt and the observations of Cantegril, Jeandel, and Belland. See chapter iii: The Woods.
[6] Verses addressed by G. C. to Sir Walter Raleigh.—Hakluyt, i, p. 668.
——I troer, at Synets Sands er lagt i Öiet,
Mens dette kun er Redskab. Synet strömmer
Fra Sjælens Dyb, og Öiets fine Nerver
Gaae ud fra Hjernens hemmelige Værksted.
Henrik Hertz, Kong René's Datter, sc. ii.