What the remaining penalty should be is matter for serious consideration. It appears evident that the common law of redress is not sufficient. Game is at best but a qualified property; for your interest in it ceases the moment that it leaves your land; but still you _have_ an interest, may be a considerable pecuniary loser by its infringement, and therefore you are entitled to demand an adequate protection. But then it is hardly possible, when we consider what human nature with all its powerful instincts is, to look upon poaching in precisely the same light with theft. By no process of mental ratiocination can you make a sheep out of a hare. You did not buy the creature, it is doubtful whether you bred it, and in five minutes more it may be your neighbour's property, and that of its own accord. You cannot even reclaim it, though born in your private hutch. Now this is obviously a very slippery kind of property; and the poor man--who knows these facts quite as well as the rich, and who is moreover cursed with a craving stomach, a large family, and a strong appetite for roast--is by no means to be considered, morally or equitably, in the same light with the ruffian who commits a burglary for the sake of your money, or carries away your sheep from the fold. It ought to be, if it is not, a principle in British law, that the temptation should be considered before adjudging upon the particular offence. The schoolboy--whose natural propensity for fruit has been roused by the sight of some far too tempting pippins, and who, in consequence, has undertaken the hazard of a midnight foray--is, if detected in the act, subjected to no further penalty than a pecuniary mulct or a thrashing, especially if his parents belong to the more respectable classes of society. And yet this is a theft as decided and more inexcusable, than if the nameless progeny of a vagrant should, hunger-urged, filch a turnip or two from a field, and be pounced upon by some heartless farmer, who considers that he is discharging every heavenly and earthly duty if he pays his rent and taxes with unscrupulous punctuality. It is a crying injustice that any trifling piccadillo on the part of the poor or their children, should be treated with greater severity than is used in the case of the rich. This is neither an equitable nor a Christian rule. We have no right to subject the lowest of the human family to a contamination from which we would shrink to expose the highest; and the true sense of justice and of charity, which, after all, we believe to be deeply implanted in the British heart, will, we trust, before long, spare us the continual repetition of class Pariahs of infant years brought forward in small courts of justice for no other apparent reason than to prove, that our laws care more leniently for the rich than they do for the offspring of the poor.