The Sun.
London, England, 1860-11-24 00:00:00

•

regard to its predecessors. We have had insult
cast upon our flag, we have had the sacred charac-
ter of our embassy set at nought, contrary to the laws
of nations, we have had four hundred of the gallant
attendants upon the representative of our Sovereign
either maimed or murdered by an atrocious ambus-
cade. The blood of those four hundred brave sea-
men has ever since been crying out, if not for
vengeance, for • the extorting at the point of the
sword, from the flagitious and perjured Government
of China, of something in the way of compensation.
Concessions of more ready access to the northern
ports of the empire and of a permanent access for
our ambassador, also, to the capital of the country,
hitherto closed inexorably against the foreigner !
And, together with these extorted signs and
symbols of expiation, an adequate sum in good
sterling Syce silver rung out on the nail in the
way of an indemnity. At the commencement of
September, it will be borne in mind, the demand
made by Lord ELGIN for a specified amount
in the form of an indemity, did not exceed
£2,000,000 or £2,500,000. NOW, certainly, that
moderate amount ought, in reason, to be doubled
or even trebled. With our Armstrongs limbered
up before Pekin within range of the Imperial
Palace and its environs, our demand should be not
for £2,000,000 or £3,000,000, but for £8,000,000
or £8,000,000, or it might be even, as we said the
other day, £10,000,000. The Chinese have arrears
to make up with us. We have been too often dealt
hardly with by them; and they should certainly
be made to pay down now accordingly.

The public authorities of Derby have commenced
a crusade against poachers, we fear on a system
which will hardly bear investigation. Little, we
know, can be said for the poaching class. They
are too commonly the idle hands of a parish, men
often of sharper wits than their mere industrious
neighbours, but disposed to use their ability to save
themselves the tedium and toil of daily labour.
Still such men ought not to be dealt with by extra-
legal measures, and especially, those who make
them what they are, ought not to be protected at
the expense of the public in corrupting their
neighbours. It is but too well known that
the county police were established by the
country gentlemen chiefly in aid of their
gamekeepers. The measure would hardly have
been carried, but to assist in repressing poaching at
the expense of the community. Bad enough,
surely, that the country tradesmen of all classes,
and the farmers, should have to pay this additional
game-tax, but it is surely worse for the boroughs
to be saddled also with a serious charge in behalf
of game preservers.

The Derby authorities have, it seems, employed
the town police to watch the suburbs of the borough
at hours when, we should say, they ought to
have been looking to the state of the towns-
men's shutters; and to take from persons whom they
found bringing them into the town all the
hares, rabbits, and other game they might
have with them, together with the nets
and other implements they had employed in
catching them. Of the illegality of such a step we
believe there is no doubt. The Game Laws them-
selves, disgracefully one-sided as they are, do not
authorise any one to seize at his pleasure game
and implements for catching it, when away from
the manor on which the game could be taken. On
the manor, the lord or his authorised agent has the
legal right to do it. Elsewhere, if we understand
the law aright, no one can interfere with the sus-
pected poacher. We may admit that the presump-
tion against the man is of the strongest kind, it may
amount to moral certainty, still it is not English to
strain the law against " suspects." Such a policy
may suit the despots of the Continent; it is alien
to our habits, as well as to our laws. The very boys
in the streets, here, know that it is so, and will
escape from the police across an imaginary line,
and dare them from the other side of it to do their
worst. If we mistake not the very way to secure
sympathy for poachers is to strain the law against
them. It is well known that the Game Laws are
amongst the most oppressive and unjustly adminis-
tered laws of any on the Statute Book, and to make
such intolerable relics of feudalism more stringent
than they already are is to raise the victims of
such oppression to the rank of martyrs. Those
who have no sympathy with poachers, sympathise
with poachers, badly, illegally, used.
It may be quite true that poaching trains to
other crimes; it is said that the unsuccessful poacher
will, in returning home, rob the hen-roost, or carry
off a duck or a turkey. It may be so in some cases,
yet, if it be, it would afford but a vivid illustration
of the difference between poaching and theft. It
is an undeniable fact that all a poacher's neigh-
bours of his own class sympathise with him if " the
poor fellow " gets six months for catching some
game. But if he got twelve months for stealing
what they recognise as property, they only ex-
claim, " Serve him right." If laws ought to have
regard to the moral sentiments of those whom
they are to restrain, nothing can be more
certain than that laws to punish poaching
more severely than theft will never accord
with popular instincts. 'Why, indeed, is a special
name assigned to the deed—crime, we ourselves
cannot call it, of killing a hare or a pheasant—
why is it not left to the laws against trespass and
the laws which protect other moveable property, to
repress the practice. The chief answer is, that no
lawyer can define whose property the creature is—
to which may be added that the landlords are far
more bitter against a killer of wild animals then
against " the robber of a hen-roost"—and have
established a far more stringent code against him.
We have not the slightest knowledge of the
personal or social relations of any of the
Corporation of Derby with the adjacent
landholders. But, we must confess that,
writing thus remotely from the scene of action,
we should say that their conduct looked as if they
were under some measure of Landlord influence.
They complain that there are some fifty persons in
Derby who get their living by the demoralising
means of poaching ; and, in kindness, they say to
these very men, they will break them of such bad
habits by taking from them the proceeds of their
midnight toil. They will thus drive them to better
employments—a result, we fear, not very likely ; for
we suspect that the men will only manage a little
better next time. But the grand error of the Cor-
poration is, their indulgence to the tempters, and
their severity to the tempted. How much
honour might the Corporation have gained,
and how
body, to the much good might they have
done,
by appealing, as a grave municipal :
preserving authors of the evil. Suppose they had
made a form investigation into the effect of ,game
on the character of these fifty men ; had
drawn up a report ; had passed
an
solution ; and had then transmitted a pthese
p appropriate tevery game preserver within fifteen or twenty miles of
the town—suppose they had added a municipal
petition,
on the evils of game-preserving, to both
1 louses of Parliament —they would then, as it
strikes us, have taken the manly an: useful course.
D
game-preserving and battuosshooting
ss
asesnoocuianleeevils ; pnclaim to all England that crime
in the rural districts, and therefore the cost of re-
-1 pressing it, is chiefly due, directly or indirect?, to

the Game Laws and game-preserving ; and, by de-
grees a public opinion may be created which will
abate the nuisance, and ultimately abolish the
odious game laws themselves—utterly unworthy as
they are of a free country. We would strongly
urge on the corporation to let the small game alone
and attack the greater, if at least they would stand
well with the English public. Let them insist on
doing away with the temptation, and they will no
longer need to tax their fellow-burghers for the
preservation of the adjacent landlord's pheasants.

We shall, of course, be told that we are poachers'
friends, and would recklessly deprive the gentle-
men of England of their most manly sport. We
reply, we speak of the poacher only as what he
is—the creature of artificial laws ; a man whom
the law does not brand as a thief—a man who is
not what he ought to be, because landlords do
what they ought not to do; And furthermore,
we deny that the sport which creates poachers is
manly sport. Hunting is manly—coursing is
manly—walking the fields with a pointer is manly
—but indolent waiting by a preserve till
attendants drive the fluttered game up to
the muzzles of our fowling-pieces is not
manly. It is a burlesque of sport. A sickly,
half effeminate substitute for the more vigorous
exertions which belong to real sport. The truth is,
for sport worthy of the name, a single gamekeeper
would suffice for a very large estate. We can
testify from actual knowledge of one such, in which
the farmers and the labourers are the landlord's
gamekeepers. The former he conciliates by allow-
ing them to course the hares and destroy the rabbits ;
the latter by a little cheap and judicious kindness.
The consequence is that he never wants sport, and
that the men who, if he watched and harassed
them, would set their foot—accidentally, of course
—into a nest, now take every possible care
not to disturb it. It is in this spirit that game
ought to be preserved in a country like this. Pro-
perty, game is not. As property, game will never
by any class be respected like that which has a
definite owner ; but as a source of amusement, and
protected by the genial methods which 'would con-
ciliate those who would otherwise destroy it, game
may abound to the full extent to which it is
wanted. It is really high time for the country to
speak out on this subject, and as the Derby magi-
strates are so zealous against poachers, they should
be the first to move against those who create them.

A painful and most affecting illustration of the
impediments lying thickly strewn in the path of a
truly good and brave and able man striving, heart
and soul, to win his way to distinction in the British
army has, within the last few years, been brought
more and more vividly to light by Sir HENRY
HAVELOCK'S now numerous biographers. Reading
the history of the life and fortunes-Lrather it should
be said the life and misfortunes—of that noble and
dauntless character, one marvels at the cruelty and
folly which, far more than his death-march upon
Lucknow, brought HAVELOCK to the grave so
prematurely. It is distressing to the last degree
to remark, now that it is all too late in his
regard, that because of this system, of which
HATELOCK was the victim, a nature in every
way so pure and lofty should have been
held so long in subjection, should have remained so
long unrecognised, should only at last have Ileen
recognised when worn out by protracted years of
wearisome and harassing disappointment. Know-
ing now what was then in that man's heart—what
heroic valour and what simple piety were animating
the every thought and action of that good soldier,
what uncomplaining endurance was secretly enno-
bling the patient hero's character—one's own heart
burns with indignation to remember that during
twenty of the most laborious years of his career in
his profession, as an officer in one of the regiments
of the Royal army stationed in Hindostan, he re-
mained uncared for and unnoticed among the
lieutenants if the regiment ! At the end of that
full heore of years' hard service in a climate
singularly detrimental to the health of an European
—at the end of fully twenty years of this hard
service, in a climate thus notoriously insalubrious—
he was still (in 1835) no more than second on the
list of the lieutenants. This, too, after having
signalized his ability in a sufficiently conspicuous
manner, by serving through a campaign in the
responsible capacity of deputy assistant adjutant-
general to a British army in the battle-field !
Striplings in abundance, the " curled darlings" of a
happier fortune—happier, at least so far as relates
to the larger share thus obtained of the bon-bons
of life—purchasing over that pale, studious,
religious, thoughtful, uncomplaining soldier who,
all the while, only required (what certainly
could not be said of them) for the manifestation
of the noble qualities of genius and heroism lying
latent in his almost recluse nature—the opportu-
nity ! That opportunity came at last—England
thrilled to recognise in HENRY HAVELOCK some-
what of those grand and lofty characteristics pecu-
liar to the great worthies whose names and deeds
form the most resplendent adornment 3 of her
annals—England recognised these peculiarities in
HAVELOCK, but only, alas ! when too late for the
expiation in his regard of the cruelty of her mili-
tary system and of the blunders of its responsible
chiefs. Remembering HAVELOCK'S career as a sol-
dier, and the career of Lord COCIIRANE, the late
glorious Earl of DUNDONALD—vie have before us
at a glance the folly and cruelty of the miserable
old system of promotion by interest and by pur-
chase, we have before us at a single glance the
cruelty and 'folly of the two extremes resulting
from the working of that insensate system—we
have this cruelty and this folly brought before us
at a glance by those two startling illustrations. In
the instance of HAVELOCK—there was the man
without money and without interest, who
was left for years and years to eat his
heart out with anguish in undeserved
obscurity, without a chance of gaining anything in
the way of promotion. In the instance of Lord
COCHRANE, there was the scion of a noble but
impoverished race, a Lord by courtesy, an heir
to au Earldom, who, without money, possessed in-
terest, at any rate, so far to have his name placed
upon the books of the royal navy even in the days
of his early infancy ! And yet one, who, with this
unnatural " start" in life given to him was, in spite
of far, far more than any interest that any man
ever possessed ; in spite of qualities the loftiest
and grandest ever given to a great sea-captain; in
spite of a valour that was never surpassed,
and a warlike genius that it would hardly be
extravagant to say was never equalled upon the
deep—was thwarted, and restrained, and held back
doggedly by the powers that were, upon every pos-
sible occasion, and this throughout the whole of a
life so long that, when at length the great Earl
breathed his last at Kensington, he was one whole
lustre beyond the age of an octogenarian. The
cruelty and the folly, in fact, of the two extremes
of this most execrable system have, we may con-
fidently assert, never been more painfully
evidenced in all our annals than in the memorable
instance of Sir HENRY HAVELOCK and of THOMAS
COCHRANE, 10th Earl DUNDOXALD.

His Serene Highness Prince Leopold of Hohen.
I'llern has arrived at Maurigy's liotel from Berlin.