A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and EssaysBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and Essays
Bradlaugh, Charles
Free thought
2. The Legislature should declare that leaving cultivable land
uncultivated gave the Government the right to take possession of such
land, assessing it by its actual return for the last live years, and
not by its real value, and handing to the proprietor the amount of, say,
twenty years' purchase in Consolidated Stock, redeemable in a limited
term of years. The land so taken should not be sold at all, but should
be let out to persons willing to become cultivators, on sufficiently
long terms of tenancy to fairly recoup his labor and capital to the
cultivator, who should yearly pay into the National Treasury, in lieu
of all other imperial taxes, a certain proportion of the value of the
annual produce.
3. The game laws should be abolished. Game preserving in England is not
only injurious, in that it diverts land capable of corn-bearing from the
purpose it should fulfill, of growing corn to feed the starving, but
it is injurious in that it prevents proper cultivation of surrounding
farms, and demoralizes and makes criminals of the neighboring
agriculturial laborers, creating for them a kind and degree of crime
which would be otherwise unknown. Poaching, which is so severely
punished, is actually fostered and encouraged by the very landholders
who punish it. Pheasants and partridges' eggs are bought to stock
preserves; the gamekeepers who buy these eggs shut their eyes to the
mode in which they have been procured. The lad who was encouraged to
procure the eggs finds himself in jail when he learns that shooting or
trapping pheasants gains a higher pecuniary reward than leading the plow
horse, or trimming the hedge, or grubbing the plantation. Poaching is
the natural consequence of rearing a large number of rabbits, hares,
partridges, and pheasants, in the midst of an underpaid, underfed,
badly-housed, and deplorably ignorant body of people. The brutal
outrages of gamekeepers of which we read so much are the regretable but
easily-traceable measure of retaliation for a system which takes a baby
child to work in the fields soon after six years of age, which
trains all his worst propensities and deadens and degrades his better
faculties, which keeps him in constant wretchedness, and tantalizes
him with the sight of hundreds of acres on which game runs and flies
well-fed, under his very nose, while he limps ill-fed along the muddy
lane which skirts the preserve--game, which is at liberty to come out of
its covert and eat and destroy the farmer's crop, but which is even then
made sacred by the law, and fenced round by covenants, as in a Leitrim
lease. The game laws must go; they starve our population by using land
which might be golden to the autumn sun with the waving crop of wheat,
barley, and rye; they feed our prisons, and rear a criminal class in
our midst, who have to be prosecuted and guarded at great cost, and
all because hares and pheasants are higher in the landowners' eyes than
human beings.
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