birds fed off the crops, and they might not shoot or trap them; if they transgressed the Game Laws they were sent to the galleys; herds of wild boar and red deer roamed over the country, and the farmers and the peasants were forbidden to interfere with them. Englishmen! who call yourselves free, do you imagine that these relics of barbarism, swept away by the French Revolution in one memorable night, are nothing but archæological curiosities, archaic remains, fossilised memorials of a long-past tyranny? On the contrary, our Game Laws in England are as harsh as those I have cited to you, and the worst facts I am going to relate you have no parallel in the history of France. These cases are so shameful that they ought to have raised a shout of execration through the land; they have been covered up, and hushed up, as far as possible, and I have taken them from a Parliamentary Blue-book; and I have taken them thence myself, because I would not quote at second-hand deeds so disgraceful, that had I not read them in the dry pages of a Parliamentary Commission I should have fancied that they had been either carelessly or purposely exaggerated in order to point a tirade against the rich. I allude to the deer-forests of Scotland.
But before dealing with these it is interesting to note the curious points of similarity between our Game Laws and those of the French. In France, they were sometimes forbidden to mow the hay because of the cover it yielded to the birds; in England, you will sometimes find a clause inserted in the lease of a farm, binding the farmer to reap with the sickle instead of with the scythe, that is, to reap with an instrument that does not cut the corn-stalks off close to the ground, so that cover may be left for the birds; thus the farmers' profits are decreased by the amount of straw which is left to rot in the ground for the landlord's amusement. In France, the game might not be touched even if the crops were damaged; in England, the hares may ruin a young plantation, and the farmer may not snare or shoot them. In France, those who transgressed the Game Laws were sent to the galleys; in England, we send them to prison with hard labour, and we actually pay for the manufacture of 10,000 criminals every year, in order that our Princes of Wales and our landed proprietors may make it the business of their lives "to shoot poultry." In France, the herds of wild boar and red deer might not be molested; in England we manage these things better; we have, un-
