, form a pretty exact instrument with which to measure the
triumphant advance of the aristocratic or the democratic spirit. In the
year 1848 many a vast tract of forest was sacrificed in order to
purchase therewith a small fraction of popularity. Every revolution does
harm to the forest, but, provided it does not wish to strangle itself,
it leaves the field untouched.
After December 2, 1851, the gathering of fallen leaves in the forest was
countenanced in Alsace in order to make the Napoleonic _coup d' etat_
popular. It was cleverly thought out; for the never-resting war about
the forest can be for a government a mighty lever of influence on a
class of the people which is, in general, hard enough to swing round.
The concession permitting the gathering of leaves, and manhood suffrage,
are one and the same act of shrewd Bonapartist policy, only aimed at
different classes. Thus social politics lurks even behind the
forest-trees and beneath the rustling red leaves of last autumn--a
strange circle of cause and effect! The immoderate cultivation of
potatoes contributes not a little to saddle the modern State with the
proletariat, but this same cultivation of potatoes, which deprives the
small peasant of straw, drives him into the forest to seek for withered
leaves in place of straw for his cattle, and thus places again in the
hands of the State authorities a means--based upon the strange historic
ruin of our forest-franchises--of curbing a powerful part of the
proletariat.
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