XVIII.—SHOULD WASTE LANDS BE TILLED AND THE GAME LAWS ABOLISHED?
A dozen or fourteen years ago the questions attempted now to be answered were put much more frequently than at present. In the last days of the first Gladstone Administration and the earliest of the second Government of Mr. Disraeli, Liberals were looking for other worlds to conquer; and many of them, not venturing upon such bold courses on the land question as have since been adopted by even moderate politicians, fastened their attention upon the waste lands and the game laws. No great results came from the movement; other and more striking questions forced themselves to the front; and we are almost as far from a legislative settlement of the two just mentioned as in the days of a more restricted suffrage.
This is the more surprising because the points named are of practical importance to the agricultural labourer, and the agricultural labourer now holds the balance of political power. But it is not likely that this state of quietude upon two such burning topics will long continue, for the country voter is certain soon to profit by the example of his brethren in the towns, and to demand that his representatives shall attend to those concerns immediately affecting his interests.
And first as to the question of waste lands. Town-bred theorists who have never walked over a mile of moorland are apt sometimes to talk as if all the uncultivated land in the country was in that condition because of the wicked will of those who own it, and to argue that, if only an Act of Parliament could be secured, the waste lands would blossom like the rose. They have the same touching faith in the efficacy of legislation as had Lord Palmerston when he put aside some difficulty with the exclamation, “Give me an Act of Parliament, and the thing will be done.” But facts are often too strong for legislation, however well intentioned and skilfully devised, and those about much of our waste land come within the list.
A large portion of uncultivated land is mountain and moor, the greater part of which it would be impossible to make productive at any price, and the remainder could not be turned to account under a sum which would never make a profitable return. Those who think it an easy matter to cultivate waste land should visit that portion of Dartmoor which is dominated by the convict establishment. There they would see many an acre reclaimed, but, if they were told the cost in money and labour, they would be convinced that, were it not for penal purposes, both money and labour might be put to better use elsewhere. And if it be argued that the State should step in and advance all that is required to cultivate such waste as can by any possibility be brought under the plough, it must be asked why the taxpayer (for in this connection the State and the taxpayer are one and the same) should add to his burdens for so small a return.
But there is, without doubt, a large amount of land in this country which now produces nothing, and which could be made to produce a deal. That which is absorbed by huge private parks, scattered up and down the kingdom, forms a great portion of this; and though, for reasons which are mainly sentimental, one would not wish to see all such private parks turned into sheep-walks or turnip-fields, there is the consideration that property—and peculiarly property in land—has its duties as well as its rights, and that those who wish to derive pleasure from the contemplation of large spaces of cultivable but not cultivated land, and in this way prevent such from being of any direct value to the community, ought to pay for the privilege. The rating of property of this kind at the present moment is ridiculously low; it should at least be made as high as if the land were devoted to some distinctly useful end.
As with parks, so with sporting lands. The rating of the latter is utterly inadequate; and although it maybe true that much of the land, especially in England, devoted to sporting purposes, is of little value for anything else, it is equally true that a great deal of it, particularly in Scotland, is fit for cultivation, and that tenants have been cleared from it to make room for deer and grouse. In all cases where the land would have value if cultivated, the owner ought to be made pay as if that value were obtained, seeing that for his own pleasure he is depriving the community of the chance of obtaining increased food. It would be too drastic a measure to adopt the Chinese method of hanging proprietors who did not till cultivable land; but many a landowner, if made to feel his duty through his pocket, would do that duty rather than pay.
From the question of sporting lands to that of the game laws is a very short step. It may be that we have heard less of the latter during the last few years, because the Hares and Rabbits Act, passed by the second Gladstone Government in the first flush of its power, has done much to reconcile the tenant-farmers to the present state of things, by removing the grievance they most keenly felt.
The Act referred to provides (to quote Mr. Sydney Buxton’s summary) “that every occupier of land shall have an inalienable right to kill the ground game (hares and rabbits) concurrently with any other person who may be entitled to kill it on the same land; that the ground game may only be killed by the occupier himself or by persons duly authorized by him in writing; that the use of firearms is confined to himself and one other, and they may only be used during the day; that those authorized to kill the game in other ways (poison and traps, except in rabbit-holes, are prohibited) must be resident members of his household, persons in his ordinary service, and any one other person whom he employs for reward to kill the game; that tenants on lease do not come under the provisions of the Act until the termination of their lease.”
This was such a concession to the tenant-farmers that it is little wonder that those of them who had groaned under the ground game should have felt generally satisfied with it; and although a wail has been going up from certain sportsmen that if the Act be not speedily amended the hare will become as extinct as the mastodon, it is not the least likely to be altered in the direction they wish. If amended at all, it will be so as to bring winged game within its provisions.
No one acquainted with rural life can doubt that the game laws, as at present administered, are a fruitful source of demoralization and crime. They demoralize all round, for they pollute the seat of justice by allowing such game preservers as are county magistrates to wreak vengeance upon all who transgress upon their pleasures; they lower the moral standard of the gamekeepers, whose miserable employment turns them into spies of a peculiarly unpleasing description; they make the rural police a standing army for the preservation of game; and they consign to gaol many a man who, but for these laws, would be honest and free.
Such as would see justice most openly travestied should sit in a country police court and hear game cases tried. Let them notice the ostentatious fashion in which some magistrate, while a summons in which his game is concerned is being heard, will (as is carefully noted in the local papers) “withdraw from the bench” by taking his chair a foot back from his fellows and friends. Let them hear evidence upon which no man charged with any other offence would ever be convicted. Let them see the vindictive sentences that are passed. And then let them go home and think over the fashion in which that which is nicknamed “justice” is administered to any man unlucky enough to have offended a gamekeeper or a policeman, and to be charged as a poacher.
In the good old hanging days, a man was sentenced to death in a western county for sheep-stealing. The sentence was the usual one, but other sheep-stealers had been let off the capital penalty for so many years that it was greatly to the astonishment of the district that this one was hanged. Then people began to think, and, remembering that he had the reputation of being a clever poacher, they saw that he had been paid off for the new and the old. It is much the same in the rural districts to-day. In game cases the presumption of the English law courts that a man shall be held to be innocent until he is proved guilty is systematically reversed. The unsupported word of a gamekeeper is considered to be worth that of half-a-dozen ordinary men; and it is not uncommon for a defendant convicted of some offence, totally unconnected with the game laws, to have his penalty increased because the superintendent of police has whispered to the justices’ clerk, and the clerk to the magistrates, the fatal word “poacher.” Those who live in a town can scarcely conceive the open fashion in which justice is degraded by the county magistrates when the game is in question. But, if any would bring it home to themselves—and the strongest words are too faint to picture the reality—let them go to some rural court, where the justices do not imagine that the light of public opinion can be brought to bear upon them, and see how poachers are tried.
If it were only because of the widespread demoralization they cause, the game laws ought to be repealed. They are avowedly kept up for the benefit of the class which does little or no work, and they fill the prisons at our expense to preserve a sport in which we have no share and no wish to share. And, if they are to be retained on the statute book at all, their administration should, at the very least, be taken from those who are practically prosecutor, jury, and judge in one, and placed in impartial hands.