called Præmunire, by which they are outlawed; the king may imprison and fine them at his discretion, and they may be killed with impunity by any one who meets them. Of course this statute has not to be enforced. The statesmen who enacted it sagaciously foresaw that its intense severity would secure obedience; and if they thereby made hypocrites, they did not care. The laity impose fetters on the clergy, not on themselves. The clergy have been artificially trained in doctrinal systems three centuries old, and entrapped into subscriptions while mere youths; then are reviled for not advancing with the enlightenment of the age (Arnold's Zeit-Geist) by laymen who do not put out their little finger to relieve them from their burdens. When near four hundred clergymen petitioned Parliament for some relaxa more tion of the subscriptions, Edmund Burke replied, that the freedom of the clergy would be the slavery of the laity. By such rude brutality (or say ȧyvwμoourn, as а decorous word) the legislature has forbidden the clerical and the national mind to expand together; has artificially kept up the errors of which Arnold complains, and has introduced difficulties so great into the ecclesiastical problem, that a statesman is now thought mad if he touch the question until compelled from without: that is, wisdom is warned off the stage, and popular forces (many of them blind) are made arbiters. We might, in fine, complain of Mr. M. Arnold's very irritating omniscience as to many superfluous details; but we fear we have already overrun our limits in dealing with far more important matters. F. W. NEWMAN. THE FRASER'S MAGAZINE. AUGUST 1873. OUR FOOD SUPPLY AND THE GAME LAWS. THE loss sustained by farmers from the undue preservation of wild animals is frequently brought forward as an argument against the Game Laws. But the position of those who make use of this objection is untenable. In ninety-nine instances out of a hundred when a man takes a farm he makes a specific agreement that the wild animals on it, known as game, shall be reserved for the use of the proprietor of the soil. In these cases the farmer has no more right to complain of any injury done to his crops by game, than he has a right to complain of harm done by growing timber, which in like manner is usually reserved for the benefit of the proprietor. When a man of full age and sound mind, ) knowing what he is about, enters into a contract of this nature, he must be bound by the consequences. Like other men, a farmer, if he makes a miscalculation and concludes a bad bargain, must put up with the loss. If he finds that his bargain is more favourable to himself than he had anticipated, he does not think himself bound, and he is not bound either in law or in conscience, to pay more than he stipulated. A yearly tenant, and most of the farmers in England are 、 yearly tenants, may and certainly will give up the occupation of his farm, as soon as he finds that from the ravages of game, or from any other cause, he is not making a profit out of it at the existing rent, VOL. VIII.-NO. XLIV. NEW SERIES. unless indeed he can obtain such an abatement as shall enable him to make the ordinary return for the capital he employs in his business, and a fair remuneration for his own skilled labour. The case of a man who has taken a long lease of a farm is no doubt sometimes a hard one, when the game upon it is much increased after he has commenced his tenancy. Still even he has only himself to blame for having entered into a speculation that has turned out unprofitable, by reason of his imprudence in parting with the control over the wild creatures upon land which he had taken in hand to cultivate. There is, however, another aspect of this subject altogether distinct from that which relates to the farmer, one that vitally concerns the whole community; that is the question, to what extent does the preservation of animals in a wild state limit the supply of food for human beings, and in what degree is the legislation of this country responsible for any such limitation? Thirty years ago this enquiry would have been contemptuously met with the reply, that a man had a right to do what he pleased with his own; and that if the farmers were satisfied with their position, as was proved by their remaining in their farms, no one else had any concern in the matter. But now, when the right of a few to hold absolute dominion over the whole surface of the land on which we L 2 live and move and have our being, is seriously questioned; and when people in all ranks of life are loudly complaining that the necessaries of life are day by day becoming dearer, and that this is, in part at least, owing to the legal protection afforded to wild animals, a different tone is taken. It is not denied, for it cannot be denied, that these creatures destroy a large portion of the annual produce of the soil. When the landlords assert that their tenants get their farms at a reduced rent on account of the game upon them being preserved, they thereby acknowledge that the produce of the soil is to a greater or less degree diminished by their ravages. At the present day the favourite argument of the gamepreservers is that game, including rabbits, when killed and brought to market, yields a large and valuable supply of food for the consumption of our town population. Indeed, to judge by the letters and speeches which have appeared in the public papers lately, one would think that our poor are chiefly fed upon rabbits and game, not forgetting venison, which writer declares is much cheaper than beef or mutton. No doubt large quantities of rabbits are sold in our towns, but these chiefly come from Belgium, and are reared by the careful Flemings in a domesticated state in warrens and pens, where they merely consume the food that is given to them, and are not permitted to do the damage to the growing crops which is done by them in their wild state in this country. For it is this which constitutes the peculiarly noxious character of game; they do not feed upon corn and turnips when they arrive at maturity, but they eat them down at an early stage of their growth, and destroy in a few days whole acres of young grain. They gnaw the rind of the turnips in the autumn, and by expos one ing them to the early frosts, cause them to rot away. There are other crops of great value in agriculture, such as carrots, vetches, lucerne, &c., the cultivation of which the farmer cannot even attempt in a country where game is at all strictly preserved. A comparatively small number of hares and rabbits will destroy in a few hours a whole field, the produce of which, if suffered to come to maturity, would have been sufficient to fatten a score of oxen, or a flock of sheep. A single hen pheasant has been known to tear up a quarter of an acre of beans when the blade was about two inches above the ground, thereby preventing the growth of what would have kept a yard full of poultry through the winter. No candid enquirer into this part of the subject can doubt that each head of game destroys far more than its own value, to say nothing of what it consumes; and just in proportion as Lord Malmesbury and other game preservers prove the production of wild animals to be large, do they at the same time prove the destruction of the food of the people to be great. This view of the subject was put in a clear and forcible light by a Scotch farmer, Mr. W. Smith, from Forfarshire, in his examination before the House of Commons Committee last year. 'A tenant,' said he, could undertake to graze any number of sheep or cattle for his landlord, and make his calculation accordingly. Sheep and cattle can be kept within fences, but hares and rabbits cannot be prevented from going over the whole farm. If they eat down a crop at an early stage, it never recovers the damage done.' Is it not manifest that an enterprising agriculturist such as Mr. Mechi, labouring to make his fields yield the utmost amount they are capable of producing, would rather keep a hundred sheep on his farm, feeding where and on what he pleased, than a hundred hares or rabbits free to feed wherever and on whatever they pleased? Anyone can realise the force of this observation by reflecting or, if he be so disposed, by experimenting-on what would be the difference in the cost of keeping half-a-dozen rabbits at free quarters in his garden, and the cost of keeping the same animals in a hutch, fed with such portion of the garden stuff as the gardener selected for them. Yet, obvious as all this is, we find people gravely asserting, and apparently expecting others to believe, that the repeal of the laws for the protection of these animals in their wild state will diminish the quantity produced to supply the demand of the meat market. A reference to the result of the different modes of culture at present in use in Scotland and Belgium is decisive upon this point. The Chamber of Agriculture in Edinburgh estimate that 720,000 rabbits are annually produced and brought to market in that country. They further estimate that these rabbits are produced at the cost of what would raise a fifth of that number of sheep. Now, Lord Malmesbury himself, in a letter to the Times of December 10, informs =) us, on the authority of Mr. Brooks, the great salesman of Leadenhall Market, that 1,500 cases of rabbits of 100 each arrive weekly from Ostend alone. This makes 7,800,000 every year, more than tenfold the supply of Scotland, though Belgium is not half the size of the former. Unquestionably the number of Ostend rabbits imported into London is enormous, and increases every year. The working-classes are the chief consumers of them, because they are cheaper than the wild rabbits. We may remark that the wild rabbits seldom weigh more than two pounds apiece, while the Ostend rabbits are fattened up to four and even as high as to eight pounds apiece. Supposing, there fore, that hares and rabbits in their wild state were to be extirpated altogether, through the repeal of the Game Laws, which is a most unlikely supposition, there is no reason why, the production of these animals here should be diminished, no reason why on the contrary, it should not be greatly increased. It probably would increase, unless other countries from particular circumstances were able to supply us with them at a cheaper rate than we could do at home. Other game preservers besides Lord Malmesbury seem to be greatly exercised in spirit as to what will become of the working man if he is robbed of his rabbit by an iniquitous abolition of the Game Laws. Mr. Baily, the poulterer, who in 1845 supplied Mr. Grantley Berkeley with a great deal of information, thinks that in a great many instances it would deprive the working man of his Sunday dinner. He looks to the rabbit for his Sunday dinner.' Sir J. Elphinstone went so far as to assure the Committee of the House of Com. mons that he considered the rabbit to be the poor man's best friend. The working man has good reason, we think, to exclaim, 'save me from my friends,' whether by friends we understand the rabbit or Sir J. Elphinstone himself. Upon this point the opinion of practical farmers acquainted with the damage actually caused by wild animals is of infinitely greater value than the vague conjectures of sportsmen. Mr. W. Smith, the tenant farmer referred to above, who is also President of the Scottish Chamber of Agriculture, being asked this question, 'Do you yourself, personally, as an experienced agriculturist, believe that if hares and rabbits were abolished, the immediate effect would be a decrease in the price of beef and mutton?' replied, I have not much doubt that if you took the whole broad question, and stopped the encroachment on our sheep walks, and the destruction of our turnip crops by hares and rabbits, we should certainly have a very appreciable addition to our food supply.' 'What would be the amount?'-'I could not estimate that; but we know that there is an immense falling off in the amount of stock in Scotland, which has been occasioned by the encroachment upon the sheep walks by deer forests; but I cannot give evidence with regard to that, because I have no personal experience; but we know quite well that there are very nearly 3,000,000 fewer sheep than there were in the country some short time back." Similar to this is the evidence of Mr. Shepherd, a very shrewd tenant farmer from East Lothian, whose teeth' for half a century past had been set on edge' against the Game Laws. What strikes me at the very first, is their anomalous character in this way, that they go to establish two rights to the same ground; first, the right of the tenant to grow crops for sale, and the other, the reserved right of the landlord, which is always so reserved, to grow game to destroy those crops, that game being for sale also generally now.' 'And those two rights are looked upon now in a commercial light, are they not ?' 'I look upon the attempt to establish two rights of that kind as not at all an enlightened commercial view, at any rate.' And afterwards, in answer to the question whether he would like to see game exterminated, he replies, "I merely think this, that all wild animals are a loss to the nation. I think that every animal in a wild state is a loss to the country, and causes more damage than its value a great deal.' 'You consider that the food they eat and destroy would be much better consumed by tame animals, such as sheep, and possibly better for the 1 Game Law Report, 6303-6307. country ?'-'You may, if you choose. keep hares and rabbits confined as you keep other creatures. Just now, supposing we were to allow sheep, or oxen, or horses to roam over the whole of one's farm, where would the crops be? You can keep a great many sheep, oxen, and horses if you bring their food to them where they ought to be, and confine them ; and I hold that the same thing applies to a certain degree with hares and rabbits. They might be fed to advantage very possibly by being confined, and the food brought to them as to any other animal that you feed.' And in a subsequent part of his examination, he says, 'I think that a hare and a rabbit in a wild state is a loss, and I think that the way to preserve them to advantage is to confine them and feed them, and I hope the time may come when it may be a great trade yet. I am supposing that they were entirely away from cultivated grounds, and that you took and confined them like other feeding animals, which I think quite possible. This may become a great trade in the future, feeding the hares and rabbits artificially, instead of allowing them to roam at will as they do just now. I think it quite possible that there may be great feeding places for hares and rabbits."3 What may be the amount of the annual damage done by game, if we take the entire extent of England, it is almost impossible to calculate even approximately. On certain farms it is enormous. The fullest and best information we have on this point is to be found in the evidence given before the Committee of the House of Commons, which was obtained on the motion of Mr. Bright in 1845, and which is generally called Mr. Bright's Committee. It went very fully into the question of the injury done to the crops of 2 Game Law Report, 7321. Game Law Report, 7571. |