A larger source of wonder is it to reflect that this same unaccountable passion for killing pheasants and pursuing foxes has so deep a root in English life that its arrest and disappointment by such a change of the Game laws as would lead to the abolition of game would practically revolutionize all our manners. The attraction of the towns already preponderates over that of the country; but till lately the grouse have had the honor of proroguing annually the British Senate, and the partridges, the pheasants, the woodcocks, and the foxes induce pretty nearly every man who can afford to shoot or hunt them to bring his family to the country during the season wherein they are to be pursued. Of course women, left to themselves, would mostly choose to spend their winters in town, and their summers from May till November in the country. But Sport determines the Session of Parliament, and the Session determines the season; and, as women love the London Season quite as much as men like foxhunting, both parties are equally bound to the same unfortunate division of time, and year after year passes, and the lilacs and laburnums and hawthorns and limes in the old country homes waste their loveliness and their sweetness unseen, while the little children pine in Belgravian and South Kensington mansions when they ought to be romping among their father’s hay-fields and galloping their ponies about his park. All these arrangements, and, further, the vast establishments of horses and hounds, the enormous expenditure on guns and game-keepers and beaters and game-preserving,—the sole business of thousands of workingmen, and the principal occupation and interest of half the gentlemen in the country,—would be swept away by a stroke. By some such change as this, or, more probably, by the pressure of a hundred sources of change, it is probable, nay, it is certain, that the old form of country life (which I have been describing, perhaps, rather as it was a few years ago than it is now) will pass away and become a thing of memory. When that time arrives, I cannot but think that England and the world will lose a phase of human existence which, with all its lights and shadows, has been, perhaps, the most beautiful and perfect yet realized on earth. Certainly, it has offered to many a happiness, pure, stable, dignified, and blameless, such as it will be hard to parallel in any of the novel types of high pressure modern life.