Effects of the French Revolution.
The abrogation of the game laws and of the harsh provisions of the forestal code was one of the earliest measures of the revolutionary government; and the removal of the ancient restrictions on the chase and of the severe penalties imposed on trespassers upon the public forests, was immediately followed by unbridled license in the enjoyment of the newly conceded rights.
In the popular mind the forest was associated with all the abuses of feudalism, and the evils the peasantry had suffered from the legislation which protected both it and the game it sheltered, blinded them to the still greater physical mischiefs which its destruction was to entail upon them. No longer under the safeguard of the law, the crown forests and those of the great lords were attacked with relentless fury, unscrupulously plundered and wantonly laid waste, and even the rights of property in small private woods ceased to be respected. [Footnote: "Whole trees were sacrificed for the most insignificant purposes; the peasants would cut down two firs to make a single pair of wooden shoes."—Michelet, as quoted by Clave. Etudes, p. 24.
A similar wastefulness formerly prevailed in Russia, though not from the same cause. In St. Pierre's time, the planks brought to St. Petersburg were not sawn, but hewn with the axe, and a tree furnished but a single plank.] Various absurd theories, some of which are not even yet exploded, were propagated with regard to the economical advantages of converting the forest into pasture and plough-land, the injurious effects of the woods upon climate, health, facility of internal communication, and the like. Thus resentful memory of the wrongs associated with the forest, popular ignorance, and the cupidity of speculators cunning enough to turn these circumstances to profitable account, combined to hasten the sacrifice of the remaining woods, and a waste was produced which hundreds of years and millions of treasure will hardly repair.
In the era of savage anarchy which followed the beneficent reforms of 1789, economical science was neglected, and statistical details upon the amount of the destruction of woods during that period are wanting. But it is known to have been almost incalculably rapid, and the climatic and financial evils, which elsewhere have been a more gradual effect of this cause, began to make themselves felt in France within three or four years after that memorable epoch. [Footnote: See Becquerel, Memoire sur les Forets, in the Mem. de l'Academie des Sciences, c. XXXV., p. 411 et seqq.
Similar circumstances produced a like result, though on a far smaller scale, in Italy, at a very recent period. Gallenga says: "The destruction of the majestic timber [between the Vals Sesia and Sessera] dates no farther back than 1848, when, on the first proclamation of the Constitution, the ignorant boor had taken it for granted that all the old social ties would be loosened, and therefore the old forest-laws should be at once set at naught."—Country Life in Piedmont, p. 136.]
Increased Demand for Lumber.
With increasing population and the development of new industries, come new drains upon the forest from the many arts for which wood is the material. The demands of the near and the distant market for this product excite the cupidity of the hardy forester, and a few years of that wild industry of which Springer's "Forest Life and Forest Trees" so vividly depicts the dangers and the triumphs, suffice to rob the most inaccessible glens of their fairest ornaments. The value of timber increases with its dimensions in almost geometrical proportion, and the tallest, most vigorous, and most symmetrical trees fall the first sacrifice. This is a fortunate circuinritiinco for the remainder of the wood; for the impatient lumberman contents himself with felling a few of the best trees, and then hurries on to take his tithe of still virgin groves.
The vast extension of railroads, of manufactures and the mechanical arts, of military armaments, and especially of the commercial fleets and navies of Christendom, within the present century, has incredibly augmented the demand for wood, [Footnote: Let us take the supply of timber for railroad-ties. According to Clave (p. 248), France had, in 1862, 9,000 kilometres of railway in operation, 7,000 in construction, half of which is built with a double track. Adding turn-outs and extra tracks at stations, the number of ties required for a single track is stated at 1,200 to the kilometre, or, as Clave computes, for the entire network of France, 58,000,000. This number is too large, for 16,000 + 8,000 for the double track halfway = 24,000, and 24,000 x 1,200 = 28,800,000. In an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July, 1863, Gandy states that 2,000,000 trees had been felled to furnish the ties for the French railroads, and as the ties must be occasionally renewed, and new railways have been constructed since 1863, we may probably double this number.
The United States had in operation on the first of January, 1872, 61,000 miles, or about 97,000 kilometres, of railroad. Allowing the same proportion as in France, the American railroads required 116,400,000 ties. The Report of the Agricultural Department of the United States for November and December, 1869, estimates the number of ties annually required for our railways at 30,000,000, and supposes that 150,000 acres of the best woodland must be felled to supply this number. This is evidently an error, perhaps a misprint for 15,000. The same authority calculates the annual expenditure of the American railroads for lumber for buildings, repairs, and cars, at $38,000,000, and for locomotive fuel, at the rate of 10,000 cords of wood per day, at $50,000,000.