Page:The land, the people, and the coming struggle .djvu/16

 who buy these eggs shut their eyes to the mode in which they have been procured, although in most instances it is thoroughly certain how they have been obtained. The lad who was encouraged to procure the eggs, easily finds that shooting or catching pheasants gains a much higher pecuniary reward than leading the plough-horse, trimming the hedge, or grubbing the plantation. Poaching is the natural consequence of rearing a large number of rabbits, hares, partridges, and pheasants, in the midst of an underpaid, under-fed, badly-housed, and deplorably ignorant mass of agricultural labourers. The brutal outrages on gamekeepers, the barbarous murders of police, of which we read so much, are the regrettable, but very natural, measures of retaliation for a system which takes a baby child to work in the fields, sometimes soon after six years of age, commonly before he is eight years old, which trains all his worst propensities, and deadens or degrades his better faculties, which keeps him in constant wretchedness, and tantalises him with the sight of hundreds of acres on which game runs and flies well-fed, under his very nose, while he limps ill-fed along the muddy lane which skirts the preserve—game, which is at liberty to come out of its covert and eat and destroy the farmer's crop, but which is even then made sacred by the law, and fenced round by carefully-drawn covenants.

An agricultural labourer (with a wife and family), whose weekly pittance gives him bare vitality in summer, and leaves him often cold and hungry in winter, in the midst of lands where game is preserved, needs little inducement to become a poacher. Detected, he resists violently, for his local judges are the game owners, and he well knows that before them he will get no mercy. The game watchers are armed with flails, bludgeons, and firearms; the poacher uses the same brute argument. Indicted at the Assize he goes to the county gaol, and his wife and children go to the union workhouse. Imprisonment makes the man worse, not better, and he is confirmed into the criminal class for the rest of his life, while his family, made into paupers, help to add still more to the general burdens of the country.

In the agricultural districts, offences in connection with the Game Laws are more numerous than those of any other class. Men suspected of inclination for poaching are easily sent to gaol, for cutting a twig or for nominal trespass, by magistrates who, owning land on which game is reared, re-