Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/252

 them turned out of their small tenements or holdings.

But this was but one of many evils incident to the condition of these Scotch villagers. The English squire is strict enough about the preservation of his game, and the English farmer often feels to his cost the consequences of such preservation.

But this is nothing to what the Scottish inhabitants of this village—which is only an average example of a Scottish village—ab uno disce omnes—felt and suffered. They were as much attached by feeling to the soil, where their fathers had lived for many generations, as the villeins regardant were bound to the soil by the feudal law. It is, indeed, as I have heard some of them sorrowfully say, "a grievous oppression," when the great landholder, who is the lord of the soil for miles round, tells them, if they complain of the all but total destruction in many cases, in some of the total destruction of their little crops by his game—that, if they do not like it, they may go elsewhere; and when this "great man's" numerous gamekeepers, who with their guns on full cock, strut on the public highways with the airs of Prussian policemen, shoot the poor man's favourite little dog, sitting inoffensively at its master's door.

"Strange!" said an Englishman one day as he