Government Works

There is an important political difference between these latter 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 simply 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 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.