Runcorn and Widnes Examiner. — 1870-05-14 (Runcorn, Cheshire, England)

WARRINGTON BOROUGH COURT.  they carried their greediness to an unbearable pitch. The feeling of independence in the matter of game, might make tenant farmers, too, less dependent in other matters, might teach them that rent only, and not votes, wero due to the landlord in exchange for the use of the land. This compromise therefore, for after all it is a compromise, and none th 3 less statesmanlike for being such, we should advise our agricultural friends to accept. If oppressed, they will have the remedy in their own hands, and in seeking and obtaining that remedy will have public opinion on their side. And we would strongly recommend the landlords to accept the compromise as well. It is what the honest man does already, and can only be objected to by the dishonest, who not satisfied with the rent paid for the privilege of cultivating the land, seek to feed their own stock on crops raised at another man's expense on soil demised for agricultural and not for game purposes. Nor do we believe that with a House of Commons, of whom at least three-fourths are rich men, and with a House of Lords of whom nearly every one is a landowner, it is possible at present to obtain more than a compromise. A time will come—perhaps it is nearer than many think—when sport will be impossible except in the wild and uncultivated parts of the United Kingdom, and our adventurous spirits will have to seek it in more distant countries. Already, by the increase of wealth and the number of men able to keep a horse, as well as the facility of railway communication to a favourite centre, the pursuit of the fox and the consequent injury to the land has become a burden almost too hard to be borne by the tenant farmer. We begin to hear murmurings against "large fields," and complaints of damaged wheat and clover nearly as bad as against hares and rabbits. Already for miles round our large towns farming has become gardening and the invasion of sportsmen, beaters, and dogs is groaned over nearly as much as the presence of a pig in an onion bed would be. But just now our Legislators are not capable of recognising that fact, and we must leave them to the pressure of advanced public opinion as years go on and as the case grows stronger. After all it is hard to reconcile the claims of civilisation with the innate savageness of the human mind. If you wanted an illustration of the truth of the saying of the French naturalist "Le Mille est tree severage," we might find it in our columns of a fortnight ago, wherein it was recorded how a large portion of the chivalrous gentry of Mid-Cheshire met together for the purpose of mobbing a poor animal to death in a ditch. We take the essence of sport to be the presence of some danger to the pursuer, the existence of a fair chance of escape for the animal pursued. We hold the sportsman to be one who inflicts no unnecessary pain, no needless torture of delay in the death of his quarry. Whether the murder of the otter at Peover was true sport, whether those present were real sportsmen we leave to the consideration and second-thoughts of those who were there to decide. We will only draw the conclusion to illustrate our argument that spite of centuries of civilisation, spite of long d.escont and high education, spite of doctrines of mercy and kindness preached every Sunday from a hundred pulpits, there was little difference between those well-born men and dainty dames who rushed into the ring to see the poor brute mercilessly worried—there is little difference between the average Englishman and Englishwoman at times of excitement, and those men and matrons who watched in the arena the Gladiator. "Butchered to make a Roman holiday."  A