to swell your rentals. It was for this object the Corn Law was passed,
and yet in the face of your countrymen you dare to call it a law for the
protection of native industry....

Again, a rural police is kept up by the gentry; the farmers say for the
sole use of watching game and frightening poachers, for which formerly
they had to pay watchers. Is this true, or is it not? I say, then, you
care everything for the rights--and for something beyond the rights--of
your own property, but you are oblivious to its duties. How many lives
have been sacrificed during the past year to the childish infatuation of
preserving game? The noble lord, the member for North Lancashire, could
tell of a gamekeeper killed in an affray on his father's estate in that
county. For the offense one man was hanged, and four men are now on
their way to penal colonies. Six families are thus deprived of husband
and father, that this wretched system of game-preserving may be
continued in a country densely peopled as this is. The Marquis of
Normanby's gamekeeper has been murdered also, and the poacher who shot
him only escaped death by the intervention of the Home Secretary. At
Godalming, in Surrey, a gamekeeper has been murdered; and at Buckhill,
in Buckinghamshire, a person has recently been killed in a poaching
affray. This insane system is the cause of a fearful loss of life; it
tends to the ruin of your tenantry, and is the fruitful cause of the
demoralization of the peasantry. But you are caring for the rights of
property; for its most obvious duties you have no concern. With such a
policy, what can you expect but that which is now passing before you?

It is the remark of a beautiful writer that "to have known nothing but
misery is the most portentous condition under which human nature can
start on its course." Has your agricultural laborer ever known anything
but misery? He is born in a miserable hovel, which in mockery is termed