The talk ran on smuggling and its decline. A Mr St Aubyn, of Clowance, lamented this decline as symptomatic--'the national fibre's deteriorating, mark my words.' A Mr Trelawny was disposed to agree with him. 'And, after all,' he said, 'the game was a venial one; a kind of sport. Hang it, a Briton must be allowed his sporting instincts!' 'By the same argument, no doubt, you would justify poaching?' put in Sir John, with a twinkle. Mr Trelawny would by no means allow this. 'It would interest me, sir, to hear you define the moral difference between smuggling and poaching,' said Doctor Unonius. 'I don't go in for definitions, sir,' Mr Trelawny answered. 'I'm a practical man and judge things by their results. Look at your Polpeor folk--smugglers all, or the sons of smugglers--a fine upstanding, independent lot as you would wish to see; whereas your poacher nine times out of ten is a sneak, and looks it.' 'Because,' retorted the doctor, but gently, 'your smuggler lives in his own cottage, serves no master, and has public opinion--by which I mean the only public opinion he knows, that of his neighbours--to back him; whereas your poacher lives by day in affected subservience to the landowner he robs by night, and because you take good care that public opinion is against him.' 'To be sure I do,' affirmed Mr Trelawny, and would have continued the argument, but here old Squire Morshead struck in and damned the Government for its new coastguard service. 'I don't deny,' he said, 'it's an improvement on anything we've seen yet under the Customs, or would be, if there was any real smuggling left to grapple with. But the "trade" has been dwindling now for these thirty years, and to invent this fire-new service to suppress what's dying of its own accord is an infernal waste of public money.' 'I doubt,' Sir John demurred, 'if smuggling be quite so near death's door as you fancy. Hey, doctor--in Polpeor now?' The doctor opined that very little smuggling survived nowadays; the profits were not worth the risk. 'Though, to be sure,' he added, 'public opinion in Polpeor is still with the trade. For an illustration, not a soul in the town will let the new coast-guardsmen a house to live in, and I hear the Government intends to send down a hulk from Plymouth Dock and moor it alongside the quay.' He paused. 'But,' he went on, with a glance over his spectacles at Sir John, 'our host, who owns two-thirds of the cottages in Polpeor, may correct me and say that Government never offered a fair rent?' Sir John threw back his head and laughed. 'My heir, when he succeeds me,' he said, 'may start new industries in Polpeor; but I'll not build new houses to worry my sitting tenants.'