Page:The English Peasant.djvu/149

 Boat-building went on in many a barn, and the foresters had fierce fights with the coast-guard, defending their ill-gotten booty with "swingels." Sometimes they had the worst of it, and then in their flight they would pitch the goods into one of the numerous ponds with which the Forest abounds, returning some subsequent night to haul them up again. Thus arose the well-known expression "moon-rakers." The spirits were frequently kept buried beneath the fireplace or the stable, as the local proverb says, "Keystone under the hearth, keystone under the horse's belly."

Happily the temptation to smuggling and poaching has ceased to exist,—in the latter case by the withdrawal of the deer in 1851. It is still true that there are men in the Forest who partially support themselves by stealing game, but the general tone of public morality has so much improved that one who has lived amongst them as a minister nearly thirty years, affirms that, if drink were put aside, he does not believe that there is a more decent, orderly, and honest community in the kingdom.

What a fact for the advocates of the abolition of the Game Laws and of ale-houses! Here is a population for eight centuries a lawless race, made so because their rulers cared more for the preservation of wild animals than they did for the moral elevation of the human beings committed to their charge. The deer abolished, the laws concerning them a dead letter, and the demoralized people rapidly return to law-abiding ways.

Eight centuries of deer-stealing, one might have supposed, would have so ingrained poaching into the nature of a forester, that their removal would have only driven him to seek a new channel for the gratification of his propensity. But such has not been the case with the greater part of the population; and it is fair to argue that, just as the forester has learnt to be honest now the deer are gone, so would he learn to be sober if that infinitely more demoralizing influence was removed, namely, the existence of ale-houses.

All agree that drinking is the great vice of the foresters. It drags them down with remorseless grasp, and is without doubt the chief evil which oppresses them. Such, however, is the force of custom in this particular, that some of their employers help to make them careless workmen and improvident parents by paying them their weekly wages in the village tap-room.