Page:The work of the Liberal Party during the Last Fifty Years.pdf/4

4 barred and blocked. The holding of great estates under Entails and Settlements, and often heavily mortgaged and burdened, makes it impossible for them to be well cultivated, and thus the demand for labour is lessened, and a better rate of wages is prevented. This whole system of Land Laws must be broken down, and the new and great Reform will do little if it does not get rid, as far as possible, of the mischiefs of the past.

The Game Laws, too, will come under revision. Parliament may accept the principle that the creatures which live on and from the land, are the property, if there be any property in them, of the Farmer, at whose cost, and by whose labour, the farm is cultivated. When this principle is admitted in our law, then what is called “preservation of game” may cease; murderous conflicts on game preserves may be no longer known, and Labourers may not have before them an almost constant and irresistible temptation to become Poachers, and breakers of the law. If the new Voters will help the Liberal Party, the Liberal Landowners, the Liberal Farmers, the Liberal Shopkeepers and Tradesmen, in the towns and villages of the Counties and County Divisions, we may see much good done by a new Parliament.

If what I have written shall give information or useful counsel, I shall be glad. I have for more than forty years endeavoured to press forward in the country and in Parliament the changes to which I have referred. They have all, so far as they have been effected, in my view, been of great service to the country. The period of Reform is not yet ended; it will rest, in no small degree, on the good sense of the new Constituency, combined with what is intelligent and just in the old body of Electors, whether, as on two past occasions, in 1832 and in 1867, a large measure of Electoral Reform shall be followed by great measures of improvement in the legislation of our country. Perhaps I have written at too great length in reply to your letter—if so you will forgive me, The subject.is too grave and too great to be treated in a paragraph. I am, very truly yours, JOHN BRIGHT