The Sun.
London, England, 1862-01-25 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, !SAT ETRD AY EVENING, JANUARY 25, 1862.

the poachers are held by the United Squirearchy
for " rebels,' if the most gallant of them be caught
he dies the traitor's death.

Every one resident in the country will confess
that this is simply a faithful picture of the truth.
The war between the poachers and game preservers
is a real war, and it is useless to conceal the fact.
There is nothing like it in regard to what is really
agricultural property. There are pilferers and
stealers of such property, indeed, as of all other
property, but nothing else creates universally
where it exists a host of desperadoes and bri-
gands, if we like to call them so, in this
country. The old smugglers, who used in our
younger days to furnish tales of their exploits
to half the villages on the coast, in their conflict
with excisemen and revenue officers, were the most
like the present race of poachers. But they have
been almost extinguished; and how—by Sir JOHN
PAKINGTON'S process of more stringent laws?—just
the reverse. Smuggling has been made not worth
the hazard, and smugglers of the old class are now
but few. And this is the only resource left for the
sportsman; though we confess an unwillingness to
allow that name to the man who only watches and
pops at the game driven to him; not shoots the
game which he has traversed the country to seek.
Lord ABERDEEN'S name will, we hope, have
some influence. We should be only too glad to see
it followed by the names of Royal and other Dukes
—at least by the absence of their names from the
pheasant- slaughtering exploits withwhichwe so often
see them associated. The evil has, in truth, reached
its crisis. The country cannot go on filling the
rural districts with criminals to gratify the most
unworthy farm of sport ever devised by indolence
apeing energy. That Lord ABERDEEN will have all
the winged game preserved for him which a real
sportsman can desire, we have no doubt. They do
not injure the tenant, and we never yet knew the
tenant, nor even the rural labourer, who did not
take pleasure in obliging a good landlord. Let the
gentlemen of England return to real sport, let them
do to their tenants as they would be done unto—
they will then have game enough, and to spare,
and poachers will be unknown.

Hardly anything whatever is known, or even,
for that matter, conjecturable, as to the Ministerial
programme for the coming session. Another fort-
night and it will have commenced ; yet even now,
upon the 25th of January, all is dubious as to the
measures to be inaugurated down at Westminster
by her MAJESTY'S Ministers on the 6th of February.
There is a tolerable certainty, of course, that the
once extremely "vexed" Question of Parliamentary
Reform is again (one can't help thinking very
wisely under the circumstances) to be given the
go by. There is, besides this, an exceeding proba-
bility that that other, at any rate last year, far
more " vexed" question in relation to the alternative
of the retention or the abolition of Church Rates,
will not be settled in 1862 any more than it was
settled in 1861. Discussed these vitally im-
portant subjects of debate will be, doubtless,
in an indirect way—that is, through the ven-
tilation of them anew by those thorns in
the sides of any or every Ministry, Whig or
Tory, Liberal Coalition, or Pure Conservative,
your genuine, rough and ready, highly impracti-
cable and obdurately outspoken " Independent
Members." There they sit below the gangway,
those independent members, upon either side of the
House, ever ready to teaze an Administrator, or
to raise the view halloo for the heartening onwards
of the eager pack of the Opposition. Upon any
topic you please, large or small, of the greatest
imaginable urgency or of the utmost possible in-
difference, they are prepared at all times, if only
the matter under their scrutiny appear in any way
to have been shirked by the responsible Ministers
cf the Crown, to raise the cry, " Stole away !" and
so—Hillo! after the recusant Administration, helter-
skelter, through all the turns and doubles of a Par-
liamentary chase, night after night, in what usually
turns out to be a wholly bootless discussion.
It was in this manner that so much time
was needlessly wasted last year, particularly
on Wednesdays ! And all this simply because the
initiative was not taken by those we only could
hope to bring matters of this kind to a satisfactory
issue, namely, the occupants of the Treasury Bench,
backed by all the organized energies and numbers
marshalled under the banners of the Government.
Yet, as every one has had time before now
thoroughly to appreciate, the session of 1861 was
not by any means the fruitless session at first sup-
posed. A substantial tome * enough, edited, not
inappropriately, by a compiler and annotator of
the significant name of BIGG, has, in effect, proved
the worth of the 24th and 25th Vic-
toria to absolute demonstration. It has
proved it through upwards of one thousand pages,
comprising within them the whole of the Public
General Statutes passed in 1861—that is, in the
session 24 and 25 of VICTORIA, from cap. 1 to cap.
134 inclusively. Statutes ranging over themes as
various as the Appropriation of Seats (Sudbury and
St.Albans)—theCopyright of Designs—the Princess
ALICE'S Annuity—East India Civil Service—East
India Courts of Judicature—East Indian Loan—
Malicious Injuries to Property—University Elec-
tions—and, to conclude with, by way of example,
and as sufficiently suggestive in itself, of the prac-
tical advance made last year in the way of beneficial
legislation—in one word, Bankruptcy.
Now there cannot be a moment's doubt of it, in
regard to the parliamentary session at this moment
upon the eve of commencing, that while, in
familiar words, much has unquestionably been
done in the 24 and 25 VICTORIA, yet more remains
"to do" in the same way of wholesome legislation
in the 25 and 26 VICTORIA, about to be inaugurated
within a fortnight's time, namely, on the 6th of the
ensuing month of February.
Supposing even that the once all-important but
now almost shelved question of Parliamentary Re-
form to be given again (as we have conjectured
already cannot but be deemed judicious under the
circumstances of the case) the go by—Supposing
that other great and really in itself much urgent
question (coming ,
home as it does perpetually, in
nan',pra
"men's businesse and bosomes")
coc ne t o
the question as to the continuance or the abrogation
of Church Rates as at present levied ; supposing
this, we say, also in its turn to be quietly cushioned
or dexterouslyset aside for another twelvemonth, are
there not other subjects for wholesome legislation—
are there not other openings for practical and bene-
ficial reforms, that clamour loudly for the application
to them of the energies of those who are really re-
sponsible for the wise and judicious direction of
the sessional labours of the Legislature, meaning,
of course, no other than her MAJESTY'S Mini-
sters ? The answer to this is hardly to be made, so to
speak, by way of solo—it can, in reason, be
nothing less than choral. There are countless
legal reforms, social reforms, sanitary reforms,
and commercial reforms, that crowd, upon the
instant,
upon every reflective politician's recollec-
tion, so soon as the query above articulated is
fairly put. One remembers, among other indi-

* The Revised Statute Book ; a Collection of Public Sta-
tutes passed in 24 and 25 Vic., 1861. Unabridged. With
Tables and Index. Edited by JAMES Beau, Esq. Ono
Vol., pp. 1005. WATERLOW and SONS, 49, Parliament-
street.

vidual schemes of general improvement, the
outline of that Transfer of Lands Bill
sketched with such admirable and alluring lucidity,
two or three years back, by the master-hand of Sir
HUGH CAIRNS, perhaps the most brilliant intellect
now at the English Bar. One thinks again of Lord
BROUGHAM'S magnificent day-dream of the Consoli-
dation and Codification of the whole complex system,
or rather systems, now constituting that worse
than Cretan labyrinth, the tortuous and gigantic
structure of our English jurisprudence. One re-
members with a sense of encouragement to our
hopes, in the direction of legal reforms of all kinds,
and of every, even the greatest magnitude, the
fact that we have now sitting upon the wool-
sack, in the person of Lord WESTBITRY,
the most skilled jurisconsult now living. For
sanitary improvements, we look instinctively to the
interwoven themes of the main drainage of the
metropolis, and the northern (and shall we not also
say the southern ?) Embankment of the river
Thames. Upon the merest whisper of "Administra-
tive Reform" again—do we not instinctively turn
our regard towards the Admiralty. And so on—
we might extend this suggestive catalogue of
problems urgently demanding solution, yea, almost
indefinitely. Here, however, we shall single out
one especial subject for legislation in the Session
25th and 26th VlcT.—a reform that if but adven-
tured upon at last in a wise and generous
spirit by the responsible Minister of the
Crown, within the province of whose administration
it lies, would of itself justify the publication in full
at the close of the year of the whole public statutes
of the session for 1862 within the comptiss of an
ordinary octavo pamphlet, instead of another BIGG
volume of 1005 pages,', extending from another cap.
1 to another cap. 134 inclusively
And this one all-sufficient reform ? Can there be
any doubt as to what it really is that we have here
implied ? Hardly we should suppose—coming
home as it does more directly, more intimately, more
impressively than even the irritating question of
Church Rates to the " men's businesse and.bosomes
in every household in this same land of heavy and
most unequal taxation." Allusion is, of course, made
to nothing more nor less than the Income Tax—that
Income-tax which, as at present assessed, is, without
any doubt, the most cruel and grinding impost
levied in the name of the Crown upon the honest
industry of Englishmen. Mr. GLADSTONE, in
one of his great Budget speeches, spoke
almost despairingly in the words of the
Poet-Laureate, TENNYSON, (referring, of course,
while doing so, to the obnoxious Tax upon In-
comes), in allusion to some remote Minister in
futuro (he felt it could not be Mr. GLADSTONE!),
of whom it might be said—

" Ho took away the tax,
And built himself an everlasting fame."
As a writer in the current number of the West-
minster Review admirably well remarks upon this
allusion—" It is not by ' taking away the tax' that
a Chancellor of the Exchequer can build himself
an everlasting name,' but by adapting it for per-
petuity, and connecting his name with those
reforms which would make it a lasting monu-
ment of his political skill and fearless
justice." Will Mr. GLADSTONE, coming afresh
to the consideration of this weighty problem,
adventure upon that same task of adapting the tax
for perpetuity ? Will he yet—he can if he cares
to do so—build himself an everlasting fame by
its equitable adjustment P There is before him an
immense and magnificent opportunity. It matters
nothing that he is committed to another course
altogether by his arguments recorded upon
those inexorable pages of Hansard. The age in
which our brilliant Chancellor of the Exchequer
lives, and which he adorns, is the age of recalci-
tration. Those who care before the session be-
gins in earnest to review for themselves, for their
own satisfaction, for the better adjustment 9f their
hitherto, it may be, confused ideas upon the subject,
the whole comprehensive question of the Income
Tax, as well as that of its present iniquitous and that
likewise of its possible equitable assessment—will
find the theme discussed in all its bearings in the
course of a very masterly treatise by the above-
mentioned Reviewer in the current number of the
Westminster. Our remarks have been already
extended to a length so unconscionable, so far be-
yond our original intention, that we are precluded
from making one or two suggestive extracts from
the paper referred to in our distinguished quarterly
contemporary—passages that we had pencilled for
quotation to the end that our readers by a
perusal of these merely casual fragments
might be incited to a careful perusal of the
whole elaborated and thoroughly well digested ar-
gument. As it is, we content ourselves with
urging the attention of all (as the lawyers have it)
to whom these presents may come, to follow the ad-
vice (applying it to the present instance) of the sea-
surgeon in Mr. DICKENS'S last Christmas tale, to
turn to the direction indicated and " judge for
themselves." We have in these columns of The
Sun ourselves so often considered the whole of this
vital question of the Income-tax, now in detail,
now in its entirety, that we may here for once rest
satisfied with this passing reference to the reconsi-
deration of that question elsewhere, as in the in-
stance of the brilliant and really masterly paper in