fathers from taking possession of any wild creature which might come across their path, for it was long before Englishmen could believe in the right of any individual to the sole possession of the game of a district. This contempt for the Conscience is in itself a temptation to crime. The first step in opposition to the law appears very like the vindication of Justice, but the rubicon once passed, a disregard of all law ensues.
Lord Suffield, writing sixty years ago, showed that it was the most natural thing in the world for an English labourer to become a poacher. At that time over the greater part of England by incessant toil the agricultural labourer could scarcely earn more than ninepence or a shilling a day, while a gang of poachers had been known to take as much as three sacks of game in one night. Wherever there were game preserves the whole country side was demoralised, the most apparently respectable persons being implicated. A case occurred in 1816, in Gloucestershire of a large gang fully organised, having at its head the collector of the rates and taxes in the parish, who was looked upon as a respectable farmer. These gangs were co-operative societies, for they not only provided guns and other instruments, but hired men at wages little above that given to the gamekeepers to do the actual poaching while they took the booty, or at least the lion's share of it, and if these servants of the gang were arrested, money was forthcoming to pay the penalties.
It would have been bad enough if the moral ruin had been confined to a few, but it was widespread, for in some villages the whole of the inhabitants were poachers. And the law by making the taking of a wild creature as much a crime as stealing a domestic animal rendered the step from poaching to sheep-stealing perfectly natural and easy; and thus the man who commenced by snaring a rabbit frequently ended by stealing a horse, for which he was hanged or transported to Botany Bay.
If under the softened régime of the Game Laws introduced in the first year of William IV., there were, between 1833 and 1846, fifty inquests on gamekeepers found dead, twenty-nine of the cases being returned as wilful murder, and in the years 1844-1846 11,392 convictions for offences against the Game Laws in England and Wales, we may judge what must have been the amount of
