The Press. — London, England, 1858-12-04 00:00:00

THE PRESS, DECEMBER 4, 1858. " vise ought to be subject, and thus setting the " first example of deadly encounter." Policemen arc men who prevent no result, but pass their l i ves in " being active ever since ;" and Landed Proprietors are gentlemen . who recklessly protect their property from spoliation and their lands from trespass. These are the plague-spots. The remedies are, the abolition of the Game Laws, and the one recommended by Mr. COBDEN in an ad dress to the people of Buckinghamshire, which is quoted as follows :—" I say to the cottager, if you have not a gun, be sure you get one, "and when you see a hare cross your path, ‘. shoot it, take it home, boil it in a pot, and eat it, and share it with your wife and family" Where shall we begin in considering this absurd hash of fallacies g Let us begin at the end. The last two are disposable in fewest words perhaps. With regard to the Cobden remedy : we happen to know something of the property mentioned, and of Mr. CoaDEN's management of it as a land lord. It was not an estate at all; and, if we remember right, he had two tenants, one the keeper of the omnium gather= shop in the vil lage, and the other a small miller. Game was unrepresented on the estate save by one solitary rabbit, to whose age the oldest inhabitant was unable to testify, and the hares which were to have been boiled in the peasant's pot, if they were to do anything towards the support of his family, must have been as miraculous in their charac teristics as the Widow's Cruise of Oil and Meal Tub ; and, moreover, they would have been pro duced had they existed, at the expense, not of Mr. COBDEN, but of his neighbour. To be generous and philosophical at the cost of others is not difficult, and is as much part of the stock in trade of such as Mr. COBDEN as wax-work simi litudes of murderers are the stage property of a Mrs. Jarley. With regard to Game Laws, we have only to say in reply to our contemporary that the re are no such things. They were extinguished when game was made saleable and accessible to every man who has land whereon to feed it. There is a law of tresss extremely insufficient and badly administered, pa but of the Game Laws of the Norman there is only one absurd and mis chievous remnant in the shape of the license from the Board of Inland Revenue to kill the crea tures which are the produce and property of the soil. With regard to the poacher, the hungry and cold November man of the Morning Star, we will venture to say—and we happen to have a remarkable amount of information upon the sub ject in our possession—that there can scarcely be produced an instance, certainly not one in a thousand, in which a man engaged in poaching from want in his family or from hunger in him self. The incentive to poaching in the peasant is the same spirit that induces men of fortune, the Dukes of RUTLAND or of BEAUFORT, Lord FITZHARDINGE or Mr. ASSHETON SMITH, Mr. HARVEY COMBE Or Mr. MORRELL, to hunt a country. It is the love of sport which is inherent in the Anglo-Saxon Race. Our contemporary is apparently extremely ignorant of the life and of the pursuits which he attempts to criticise and condemn ; and, therefore, before he writes again upon the subject we recommend him to read twu articles which were contributed by Mr. KINGSLEY to Fraser's Magazine, in, if we remember correctly, April and August of the present year, entitled " My Winter Garden" and "Chalk Streams." Even the Morning Star will probably not dispute Mr. KINGSLEY'S claims to be conside re d a friend of the poor. It is sport— sport obtained luxuriously, and sport remune rated at a higher price than ordinary labour, that creates the Poacher and enchains him to the illegal and reckless pursuit by its combined fascination of pleasure and profit. No doubt these men would make fine soldiers if they had a chance. No doubt they have innate the same qualities of mind and body that carried our officers and men through the charge at Balaklava, and through the battles of India. Poachers, as men, are not innately different from their countrymen whom circumstances con stitute Squires and Peers ; they become dif ferent ; they become degraded by the education which such publications as the Morning Star confer upon them, and by the influence of such principles as they instil into them. ,\Yho places the gam(' which, we are told, tifiably to murder him ? Our contemporary says the Landowner. We say, the Law , the defective Law, and its still more defective administration. " The police have been active ever since." Is that kind of activity the proper function of a Police Force ? Is it not their duty to prevent as much as to detect ; and can it be said that the police organization of a district is satisfactory when men—armed men, with guns loaded, not with shot to kill pheasants, but with slugs to murder men—can meet in beer-shops, and sally forth in bodies to carry out their law less enterprizes and deadly intentions ? The shortcomings of the police concern the adminis tration of the Law, but the Law itself has de fects in principle which no administration can neutralize. Under the Law as it now stands no man can kill even upon his own land the game which the law by rendering it saleable has de clared to be his own without license obtained from the Crown. To kill game is not a right, but a privilege—a theory and a practice essentially opposed in principle to the Act which makes pheasants, partridges, &c., sale able. We know that this glaring inconsistency has had a great effect upon the minds of the people, especially of those who prefer sport to work. They are convinced in their hearts that the Legislature and the Crown do not regard game as property, and that they only refrain from declaring Communism in that especial product of the soil from fear of the great proprietors of the kingdom. A conviction which they will retain till the Crown and Parliament substitute a tax upon guns for the present absurd Game Licences, and till the Secretary of State for the home Depart ment insists upon the Police putting a stop to the gathering of armed men at night for the per petration of what the Morning Star considers the heroic deed "of sallying forth in a brave state " of mind with guns and dogs to make an inroad " upon a stately property" and to murder its guardians. OUR COMMUNICATION WITH INDIA. AMONGST the consoling lessons of history, there is one which we may certainly pick out as pecu liarly adapted to the circumstances of this country at the present moment; and it is this, that events which in themselves at first seemed to bear all the tokens of the worst of evils have generally in the end contributed in a high de gree to the future benefit of the nation or per sons most intimately concerned. Take war as an instance. What calamity is more dreaded, and yet how often has it proved a blessing, and been overruled to the benefit of mankind ? In the wars of Rome this was pre-eminently true. They were the civilization of the world. As thunderstorms to an impure atmosphere, as a great fire to a packed and filthy locality, so are many severe visitations which at first seem to overwhelm or consume, but in the result take away more evil than they bring, and leave bles sings behind them that more than compensate for the incidental mischief that attended their working. When our friendly relations with other Powers are interrupted, the facilities of commerce are checked, if not destroyed. We are thrown back upon our own resources, and must either relinquish many customary luxuries and comforts or create home supplies. This necessarily gives a stimulus to enterprize, and becomes the means of developing new sources of wealth which might otherwise have lain dormant for ages. It is the tendency of a protracted period of tran quillity to induce torpor and apathy; and however much a time of peace may minister to the general happiness of society, it is far from being that in which the grandest and most original efforts of human thought are made. The age of the AzrroxlNEs was unquestionably a period of much social enjoyment in the Roman empire, but we look in vain in the annals of that penod for the intellectual enterprize, the vigorous expression, or disinterested feeling which marked the stormy days of CA:SAR or PomPEY. In spite of all its attendant evils, war undoubtedly has its opportunities of good which we have the power to turn to account ; and the Indian mutiny, \trociV is r 1175 This calamitous outbreak has taught us many trenchant lessons, but, humanly speaking, none more important than the absolute necessity of in troducing more of the progressive element into the Indian Government and Administra- tion. To do this we must begin with material appliances. We must establish the means of consentaneous action between the heart and the extremities—we must, in fact, perfect our com munications. We have already in part alluded to this subject in our comments on Lord STRATFORD DR REIX;LIFFE'S speech at Smyrna ; we have a few further observations to make upon it now. Among other considerations which the question involves is that of the people through whose in heritance we should have to cut our way. Be tween India and Eastern Europe there is a race of men unlike any other on the face of the globe, ancient in their traditions, roving in their habits, questionable in their reputation, but strong for good or ill, according as we use them. We mean, of course, the Arabs. It is with them that we should most particularly be brought in contact should we carry out the projected line of com munication by the valley of the Euphrates. It has been objected by some that this race e is not a reliable one, and that the success of railway com- munication through such an extent of country is dependent in a great measure upon the conduct of the people through whose native land it lies. But the difficulty has been overstated. The Arabs indeed are a singular people, uniting in their character the extremes of good and evil. The result of many years' experience shows them capable of the greatest fidelity and gratitude in some instances, and of the opposite vices in others. Our chief difficulty would arise from their igno rance, the feuds of tribe and blood, and, occa sionally, their religious fanaticism. But looking at the worst side of the picture, and supposing them to place every impediment in their power in our way, we should find that, notwithstanding their individual bravery and cunning, they are too incapable of combination ever to become in any strong way confederates against us. On the other hand, it has been proved that they are particularly susceptible of the good effects of kindness and good faith. As an instance of this, it is said that during the Euphrates expedition two years ago, to ;determine the practicabilityof the railway scheme, not a single injury was sus tained either to our men or means from the Arabs. They carried large and valuable stores of ammunition, provisions, and money, and in no case was there a single instance of dishonesty. Their remuneration was usually paid in advance, and yet if prevented from fulfilling their engage ments, the wages were scrupulously returned. This affords a fair inference, as far as it goes, of a good material on which to work. But, further, those who would discountenance this scheme, for fear of the Arabs, forget that a railway running through a fertile district is a vein of life. In a very few years we should see towns and villages springing up along the line of transit, peopled by thousands of these nomades, who would in time learn the arts of a more fixed and civilized mode of life. Even the period occupied in the construction of this route, and the example and influence of numbers of workmen faithfully persevering at a gigantic task, would not be without a moral and social lesson of the highest value to these people. It would increase our intercourse with them; it would teach them the advantages of employment, and open out to them new sources of gain and traffic. They are not less alive to their own interests than other races, and would soon see how the railroad pro vides remunerative work for them, their camels, and all their resources. These considerations re duce the discouragement which at first might seem to be reasonable, from the peculiarity of the Arab race, and hold out the prospect that they will eventually be helpers, rather than hin derers, of the communication between the East and West. Great is England's duty to the East. Vast have been the benefits which she has de rived from India. Immense, too, is the task that lies before her of modifying the future of that great province. For all these reasons we urge that no sort of discouragement not founded upon demonstrable impossibilities ought to prevent us from as speedily as possible reducing the distance that lies between us, by availing ourselves of the favourable track which nature and policy indi cate, and establishing the most rapid and effec tual mode transit yet discovered in our U as they instil into them. " 110 places the gamekeeper in that position notwithstanding its characteristic atzocaties, is no tual mode of transit yet duieovered in our wi lich) we are told, incites the Poacher jus. exception to the rule. intercourse with India.