THE GAME-LAWS.
During this session Lord Wharncliffe introduced a bill into the lords for altering the system of the game-laws. The provisions of this bill were threefold: first, it removed the absurd and contradictory qualifications of the old law, and substituted in their place the qualification of property, by permitting every proprietor to kill game on his own lands, whether great or small; secondly, it legalized the sale of game, as one great means of diminishing the temptations for poaching; and, thirdly, it mitigated the severity of the punishments provided by the existing law for certain offences against the game acts. This bill was allowed to be read a second time; but on the third reading it was lost by a majority of one. It had, however, scarcely been rejected when the Marquis of Salisbury introduced another, which proposed to empower all persons qualified by law to kill game to take out a licence, authorizing them to sell game to licensed dealers. This bill was likewise allowed to pass a second reading; but it was lost on a motion for the third reading by a majority of fifty-four to thirty-eight. One great alteration, however, was effected by a bill introduced by Lord Suffield, which abolished the practice of setting spring-guns and other engines of destruction for the preservation of game. This bill, which passed into a law, declared it to be a misdemeanour in any person to set a spring-gun, man-trap, or other engine calculated to kill, or inflict grievous injury, with the intent that it should destroy life, or occasion bodily harm to any trespasser or other person who might come into contact with it. An exception was made in favour of gins and traps for the destruction of vermin, and of guns placed in a dwelling-house between sunset and sunrise for the protection of that house. Scotland was excepted from the operation of the law; the six judges of the court of justiciary in that country having recently pronounced, in a case on which they had adjudicated of a man who had recently been killed by a spring-gun, that such killing, by the law of Scotland, is murder.