Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/83

Rh artificial meadows. 2. He made careful estimates of the cost of reforesting the one hundred and fifty thousand hectares in the department which needed it, and recommended that, besides remitting taxes for ten years on reforested land, and distributing seeds gratis, the state should pay three quarters and the department one quarter of the cost. lie showed that the increased revenue from taxes, after the ten years of exemption, would repay the advance in eighty-six years.

Almost every one ridiculed the proposal; it was compared to the "Arabian Nights"; and, as a reward for making it, he was deposed. But, at the same time the state was expending one hundred and twenty million francs each year for roads and bridges, and a large part of this outlay—vastly more than reforesting cost when at last wiser counsels prevailed—was made necessary by torrents which every year grew worse, but which reforesting cured.

Dugied's ideas were, in the main, those finally adopted, except that he left out the essential idea of compulsion. An entire torrent-basin must be taken in hand at the same time, and one uniform process be carried on over the whole of it. As Surell said, success should not be imperiled by the first stupid or stubborn peasant who would not do his part. The state must not only bear the expense, but also assume the direction. Expropriation or confiscation must be resorted to, as is done in taking land for roads, etc.

In May, 1856, when heavy rains fell all over France, floods in the valleys of the Loire and the Rhone did incalculable damage. This so re-enforced the appeals which had been made by specialists like Fabre, Dugied, and Surell, that the Corps Législatif consented to make a trial of the new way of fighting floods. The old way—erecting barriers, etc.—had been altogether defensive; the new was almost wholly offensive. The method, as an expert expressed it, was "to drown the torrent in vegetation"—that is, to turf the higher and more level pastures, and then to retard the flow of water down the steeper slopes below the pastures by trees, bushes, fallen leaves, and mosses, so that much of it would have time to soak into the ground and reach the spring-reservoirs, and another large portion be absorbed by the fallen leaves, etc., and held as by a sponge, or be taken up by the growing vegetation; and to hold back the remainder by millions of small obstacles so that it would reach the stream no faster than a full channel could carry it away; and, finally, that, flowing at no point over bare soil, it might reach the stream-bed as limpid as when it started down-hill.

—The hindrances to the success of the work were both moral and physical, but the moral were the greater. They were:

1. The unwillingness of an ignorant peasantry to try any new thing;

2. Reluctance on the part of the Corps Législatif and of local authorities to interfere with private rights as much as the success of the work