All this profession, however, we hope, will fail to persuade the
farmers that their late enemy has become their sudden friend; and
they will doubtless look with some suspicion upon the apocryphal
catalogue of grievances which Mr Bright has raked together, and,
with the aid of his associate, promulgated in the present volume. It
is not our intention at present to extract or go over the evidence
at large. We have read it minutely, and weighed it well. A great
part of it is utterly irrelevant, as bearing upon questions of
property and contract with which the legislature of no country could
interfere, and which even Mr Bright, though not over scrupulous in
his ideas of parliamentary appropriation, has disregarded in framing
the conclusions of the rejected report which he proposed for the
adoption of the committee. That portion, however, we shall not pass
over in silence. It is but right that the country at large should
see that this volume has been issued, not so much for the purpose
of obtaining a revision of the law, as of sowing discord amongst
the agriculturists themselves; and it is very remarkable that Mr
Bright, throughout the whole of his inflammatory address, _takes
no notice whatever of the Game laws_, or their prejudicial effect,
or their possible remedy by legislative enactment, but confines
himself to denunciation of the landlords as a class antagonistic
to the tenantry, and advice to the latter to combine against the
game-preserving habits of the gentry.
Now this question between landlord and tenant has nothing to do
with the Game laws. The man who purchases an estate, purchases it
with every thing upon it. He has, strictly speaking, as much right
to every wild animal which is bred or even lodges there--if he can
only catch or kill them--as he has to the trees, or the turf, or any
other natural produce. The law protects him in this right, in so
far, that by complying with certain statutory regulations--one of
which relates to revenue, and requires from him a qualification to
sport, and another prescribes a period or rotation for shooting--he
may, within his own boundaries, take every animal which he meets
with, and may also prevent any stranger from interfering with or
encroaching upon that privilege. We do not now speak of penalties
for which the intruder may be liable. That is a separate question;
at present we confine ourselves to the abstract question of right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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