The Sun.
London, England, 1858-11-24 00:00:00

sense.

There is now a necessary reaction in the shipping
interest. During the Russian war the freights
were so extravagant that the first cost
of a vessel was nearly defrayed by its
first freight. Several propperous years followed,
until the monetary crisis of last November led to a
commercial collapse, under which, of course,
int^rnst sf'

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petition, not for a return to protection, but for
the abolition of the last remaining shred thereof,
and for free trade in currency as, well as in every-

thing else. Then the trade and commerce of the
country would be stimulated to the highest degree,
and the shipowners would participate in the general
amelioration and prosperity.in common with all
their fellow-countrymen.

What is it that gives such a fierce and deadly
okaraeter to gamekeepers' and poachers' battles ?
Frequently enough, we have to record savage and
brutal struggles with the police, but nearly always
drink•has much to do with them, or the culprit is
some notorious ruffian. In murdergus conflicts
between the poachers for game and its defenders
all are sober ; yet, generally, all act as if they had
been inspired by brandy. Whence this vengeful
feeling—this recklessness of bloodshedding ? It
was but yesterday we had .to record another of
these fatal affrays, which return with every season.

In this case we have three persons, two keepers,
and one poacher at least, wounded dangerously
and another gamekeeper left dead on the field.
There was, unhappily, nothing very unusual in
the affair, as far as yet known. Three keepers—
JACQUES, GEDDES, and ROBINSON—start on their
rounds, about ten o'clock. In about an hour they
hear the screams of two hares. A short time
brings them face to face with the poachers ; they
are threatened by the dogs of the latter, and two of
the dogs are shot. In revenge, and in accordance
with a threat if they did shoot the dogs, GEDDES
is shot in the groin. The remaining two keepers
rush, foolishly and madly, at the poachers, who are
said to have been about sixteen in number ; JACQUES
falls dead, his head fearfully fractured with a
bludgeon, and ROBINSON lies in a precarious state.
Such is the account of GEDDES. It' is evident,
however, though he does not mention it, that one
of the keepers, at some time, fired at the poachers,
since he was arrested at Hull with fifty
shot wounds in
,his thighs. In the affair,
. .
as at present narrated, it is plain that the keepers
were either foolhardy beyond all reason, or, what is
more likely, that they lost all command Of their
reason in their rage against the poachers. Three to
sixteen was not a display of courage • required by
any laws of honour. The poachers were not Sepoys
but Englishmen, and might be expectedto resist cap-
ture, and to resent the killing of their dogs, besides
the possibility of the latter leading to detection.
The gamekeepers, to be sure, were armed with
double-barrelled guns and pistols too, but this itself
looked as if they too were intent as much on
slaughter as on capture.
It surely is time that this horrid work of preserv-
ing game by keepers armed like an Albanian sol-
dier were put an end to. The whole system is
disgraceful to the civilisation of our day. If
partridges, hares, and pheasants can only be kept
at thi3 cost, the sooner they vanish from the soil
the better. We do not need to defend legitimate.
property by such means as these. Now and then,
in times of riot and excitement, happily now so
rare in this country, the civilian may have to equip
himself like' a soldier, but this is an exceptional
state of things. It resembles more the conflict of
preventive service men and smugglers in the most
vindictive days of the Excise. 'We have a revival
of the old Riband spirit in Ireland, and hear again
of vindictive assassinations for offences against the
peasant agrarian code ; we shrink with
horror from such accounts ; we anathematise
the popery, ignorance, and barbarism of Ireland,
but we may well look at home and blush for the mur-
ders perpetrated under our Game Law code, and
because, as we can hardly doubt, of the peculiar
character of that code.
We fear it cannot be doubted that between the
magistrate and landlord class generally, and the
peasant class, or at least the poachers who spring
from it, there is a most undesirable feeling. It is
known that the magistrate• will deal more harshly
and even cruelly with the poacher than with any
other class of offenders brought before him. The
peasantry, on the contrary, think that the poacher
is an unlucky, but not a guilty man ; the game-
keeper has caught him, but only in an artificial
offence against the gentry, not in a crime against
society, morality, or religion. The poacher has
but tried to get a good supper off the wild, crea-
tures of the field ; he has wronged no man, taken
nothing from the farmer's yard or his neighbour's
house, nothing which even the man who prosecutes,
or punishes pim, could identify as his own. It is
useless to rake up farfetched arguments to prove
that game must be the property of the landlords
collectively, not of the landless workmen. Collec-
tive ownership is but an abstract fancy, which
vanishes at the sight of the tempting prey running
across the road, or easily picked up by
the help of an old cunning lurcher on a moonlight
night. The fact is undeniable, that -long thno-al
the peasantry of England have had to learn that
game is property, and stringbntly and savagely as
laws have endeavoured to enforce that lesson on
their understandings, they have not yet learned it,
nor do they appear likely to learn it.
Hence, as we conceive, the bitterness between
the landlord and the poacher. Were the man
brought up for stealing a pig or even a chicken,
the magistrate knows that every rustic would join
in his condemnation.' The: rustic knows, sometimes
practically, that pigs and fowls are property, that
they can be identified, and that each man can claim
his own, and, ought to have it.. But the magistrate
knows that while every honest man in the village
would need nothing but his conscience to keep his
hands off his neighbour's property, there is not one
of them who, if quite sure of being seen by no one,
but would think a hare or a pheasant lawful prey.
It is all a struggle, therefore, on the part of the
magistrate with the perverse rustics. They have
their notions of injustice, and he his of magisterial
power, and he will let tEem see who is master.
Just in proportion as tb e magistrate feels that he
can appeal to no innate sense of justice, but must
rely on the terrors with. -which he is armed by law,
is he disposed to use his legal powers with harsh-
ness.d e
nce
would
uil)coialciober mustthan alae onogc,itv,icic,tilelds.
peeted poacher. The benefits of doubetutlcafnrectelailaewesEs:
given to game and not to him. And the judge
who administers on these well known justice-of-the-
peace • principles is one of the game-preserving
Class.

As a natural rault of all this, there is no such