The Earth as Modified by Human Action | Page 9

was received without terror."--Resume de l'Histoire du Commerce, p. 156.] Man cannot struggle at once against human oppression and the destructive forces of inorganic nature. "When both are combined against him, he succumbs after a shorter or longer struggle, and the fields he has won from the primeval wood relapse into their original state of wild and luxuriant, but unprofitable forest growth, or fall into that of a dry and barren wilderness. The abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, which, in the time of Charlemagne, had possessed a million of acres, was, down to the Revolution, still so wealthy, that the personal income of the abbot was 300,000 livres. Theabbey of Saint-Denis was nearly as rich as that of Saint-Germain-des-Pres.--Lavergne, Economie Rurale de la France, p. 104.
Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruyere 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, Bowing, and harvesting, and therefore deserve some small share of the bread they have grown." "These are his own words," adds Courier, "and he is speaking of the fortunate peasants, of those who had work and bread, and they were then the few."--Petition a la Chambre des Deputes pour les Villageois l'en empeche ce 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 offense, he enumerates about thirty seignorial rights, the very origin and nature of some of which are now unknown, while those of some others are as repulsive to humanity and morality, as the worst abuses ever practised by heathen despotism. But Young underrates the number of these oppressive impositions. Moreau de Jonnes, a higher authority, asserts that in a brief examination he had discovered upwards of three hundred distinct lights of the feudatory over the person or the property of his vassal. See Etat Economique et Social de la France, Paris, 1890, p. 389. 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. The collection of the taxes was enforced with unrelenting severity. On one occasion, in the reign of Louis XIV., the troops sent out against the recreant peasants made more than 3,000 prisoners, of whom 400 were condemned to the galleys for life, and a number so large that the government did not dare to disclose it, were hung on trees or broken on the wheel.--Moreau de Jonnes, Etat Economique et Social de la France, p. 420. Who can wonder at the hostility of the French plebeian classes towards the aristocracy in the days of the Revolution?
Rome imposed on the products of agricultural labor in the rural districts taxes which the sale of the entire harvest would scarcely discharge; she drained them of their population by military conscription; she impoverished the peasantry by forced and unpaid labor on public works; she hampered industry and both foreign and internal commerce by absurd restrictions and unwise regulations. [Footnote: Commerce, in common with all gainful occupations except agriculture, was despised by the Romans, and the exercise of it was forbidden to the higher ranks. Cicero, however, admits that though retail trade, which could only prosper by lying and knavery, was contemptible, yet wholesale commerce was not altogether to be condemned, and might even be laudable, provided the merchant retired early from trade and invested his gaits in farm lands.--De Officiis, lib. i.,42.] Hence, large tracts of land were left uncultivated, or altogether deserted, and exposed to all the destructive forces which act with such energy on the surface of the earth when it is deprived of those protections by which nature originally guarded it, and for which, in well-ordered husbandry, human ingenuity has contrived more or less efficient substitutes. [Footnote: 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