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ingenious work, lately published by a foreigner, we learn the fatal effects of a like system on the Continent. By preserving game, gentlemen are tempted to reside in the country; and, considering that the diversion of the field is the only one of which they can partake on their estates, I am of opinion that, for the purpose I have stated, it is of essential importance that this species of property should be inviolably protected.'

If this speech of Mr Justice Best is correctly reported, it follows, that a man may put his fellow-creatures to death for any infringement of his property-for picking the sloes and blackberries off his hedges-for breaking a few dead sticks out of them by night or by day-with resistance or without resistancewith warning or without warning;-a strange method this of keeping up the links of society, and maintaining the dependence of the lower upon the higher classes. It certainly is of importance that gentlemen should reside on their estates in the country; but not that gentlemen with such opinions as these should reside. The more they are absent from the country, the less strain will there be upon those links to which the learned judge alludes the more firm that dependence upon which he places so just a value. In the case of Dean versus Clayton, Bart., the Court of Common Pleas were equally divided upon the lawfulness of killing a dog coursing an hare by means of a concealed dog-spear. We confess that we cannot see the least difference between transfixing with a spear, or placing a spear so that it will transfix; and, therefore, if Vere versus Lord Cawdor and King, is good law, the action could have been maintained in Dean versus Clayton; but the solemn consideration concerning the life of the pointer is highly creditable to all the judges. They none of them say that it is lawful to put a trespassing pointer to death under any circumstances, or that they themselves would be glad to do it; they all seem duly impressed with the recollection that they are deciding the fate of an animal faithfully ministerial to the pleasures of the upper classes of society: there is an awful desire to do their duty, and a dread of any rash and intemperate decision. Seriously speaking, we can hardly believe this report of Mr Justice Best's speech to be correct; yet we take it from a book which guides the practice of nine-tenths of all the magistrates of England. Does a judge, -a cool, calm man, in whose hands are the issues of life and deathfrom whom so many miserable trembling human beings await their destiny-does he tell us, and tell us in a court of justice, that he places such little value on the life of man, that he himself would plot the destruction of his fellow-creatures for the preservation of a few hares and partridges? Nothing which

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'falls from me' (says Mr Justice Bailey) shall have a tendency to encourage the practice. I consider them' (says Mr Justice Best) as lawfully applicable to the protection of every species of property; but, even if they might not lawfully be used for the protection of game, I for one should be extremely 'glad to adopt them, if they were found sufficient for that pur " pose. Can any man doubt to which of these two magistrates he would rather entrust a decision on his life, his liberty, and his possessions? We should be very sorry to misrepresent Mr Justice Best, and will give to his disavowal of such sentiments, if he does disavow them, all the publicity in our power; but we have cited his very words conscientiously and correctly, as they are given in the Law Report. We have no doubt he meant to do his duty; we blame not his motives, but his feelings and his reasoning.

Let it be observed that, in the whole of this case, we have put every circumstance in favour of the murderer. We have supposed it to be in the night-time; but a man may be shot in the day* by a spring gun. We have supposed the deceased to be a poacher; but he may be a very innocent man, who has missed his way-an unfortunate botanist, or a lover. We have supposed notice; but it is a very possible event that the dead man may have been utterly ignorant of the notice. This instrument, so highly approved of by Mr Justice Best-this knitter together of the different orders of society-is levelled promiscuously against the guilty or the innocent, the ignorant and the informed. No man who sets such an infernal machine, believes that it can reason or discriminate; it is made to murder all alike, and it does murder all alike.

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Blackstone says, that the law of England, like that of every other well regulated community, is tender of the public peace, and careful of the lives of the subjects; that it will not suffer with impunity any crime to be prevented by death, unless the same, if committed, would also be punished by death." (Vol. iv. Commentaries, 182.) The law sets so high a value upon the life of a man, that it always intends some misbehaviour in the person who takes it away, unless by the command, or express permission, of the law. And as to the necessity which excuses a man who kills another se defendendo, Lord Bacon calls even that necessitas culpabilis.' (Commentaries, vol. iv. p. 187.) So far this Luminary of the law.-But the very amusements of the rich

• Large damages have been given for wounds inflicted by springguns set in a garden in the day-time, where the party wounded had no notice.

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are, in the estimation of Mr Justice Best, of so great importance, that the poor are to be exposed to sudden death who interfere with them. There are other persons of the same opinion with this magistrate, respecting the pleasures of the rich. In the last Session of Parliament a bill was passed, entitled, ' An act for the summary punishment, in certain cases, of persons wilfully or maliciously damaging, or committing trespasses on public or private property. Anno primo-(a bad specimen of what is to happen)-Georgii IV. Regis, cap. 56. In this act it is provided, that if any person shall wilfully, or maliciously, ⚫ commit any damage, injury, or spoil, upon any building, fence, hedge, gate, stile, guidepost, milestone, tree, wood, underwood, orchard, garden, nursery-ground, crops, vegetables, plants, land, or other matter or thing growing or being therein, or to or upon real or personal property of any nature or kind soever, he may be immediately seized by any body, with' out a warrant, taken before a magistrate, and fined (according to the mischief he has done) to the extent of five pounds; or, in default of payment, may be committed to the jail for three • months. And at the end comes a clause, exempting from the operation of this act all mischief done in hunting, and by shooters who are qualified. This is surely the most impudent piece of legislation that ever crept into the statute-book; and, coupled with Mr Justice Best's declaration, constitutes the following affectionate relation between the different orders of society. Says the higher link to the lower, If you meddle with my game, I will immediately murder you;-if you commit the slightest injury upon my real or personal property, I will take you before a magistrate, and fine you five pounds. I am in Parliament, and you are not; and I have just brought in an act of Parliament for that purpose. But so important is it to you that my pleasures should not be interrupted, that I have exempted myself and friends from the operation of this act; and we claim the right (without allowing you any such summary remedy) of riding over your fences, hedges, gates, stiles, guideposts, milestones, woods, underwoods, orchards, gardens, nursery-grounds, crops, vegetables, plants, lands, or other matters or things growing or being thereupon-including your children and yourselves, if you do not get out of the way. Is there, upon earth, such a mockery of justice as an act of Parliament, pretending to protect property, sending a poor hedge-breaker to jail, and specially exempting from its operation the accusing and the judging squire, who, at the tail of the hounds, have that morning, perhaps, ruined as much wheat and seeds as would purchase fuel a whole year for a whole village?

It cannot be urged, in extenuation of such a murder as we have described, that the artificer of death had no particular malice against the deceased; that his object was general, and his indignation levelled against offenders in the aggregate. Every body knows that there is a malice by implication of law.

In general, any formal design of doing mischief may be called malice; and therefore, not such killing only as pro⚫ceeds from premeditated hatred and revenge against the person killed, but also, in many other cases, such as is accompanied with those circumstances that show the heart to be perversely wicked, is adjudged to be of malice prepense. 2 Haw. c. 31.

For, where the law makes use of the term, malice aforethought, as descriptive of the crime of murder, it is not to ⚫ be understood in that narrow restrained sense in which the 'modern use of the word malice is apt to lead one, a principle ⚫ of malevolence to particulars; for the law, by the term malice, malitia, in this instance, meaneth, that the fact hath been • attended with such circumstances as are the ordinary symptoms of a wicked heart, regardless of social duty, and fatally • bent upon mischief.' Fost. 256, 257.

Ferocity is the natural weapon of the common people. If gentlemen of education and property contend with them at this sort of warfare, they will probably be defeated in the end. If spring guns are generally set-if the common people are murdered by them, and the Legislature does not interfere, the posts of gamekeeper and lord of the manor will soon be posts of honour and danger. The greatest curse under heaven (witness Ireland) is a peasantry demoralized by the barbarity and injustice of their rulers.

It is expected by some persons, that the severe operation of these engines will put an end to the trade of a poacher. This has always been predicated of every fresh operation of severity, that it was to put an end to poaching. But if this argument is good for one thing, it is good for another. Let the first pickpocket who is taken be hung alive by the ribs, and let him be a fortnight in wasting to death. Let us seize a little grammar boy, who is robbing orchards, tie his arms and legs, throw over him a delicate puff-paste, and bake him in a bunn- pan in an oven. If poaching can be extirpated by intensity of punishment, why not all other crimes? If racks and gibbets and tenter-hooks are the best method of bringing back the golden age, why do we refrain from so easy a receipt for abolishing every species of wickedness? The best way of answering a bad argument is not to stop it, but to let it go on in its course till it leaps over the boundaries of common sense. There is a little book called Beccaria on Crimes and Punishments, which we strongly recom

mend to the attention of Mr Justice Best. He who has not read it, is neither fit to make laws, nor to administer them when made.

As to the idea of abolishing poaching altogether, we will believe that poaching is abolished when it is found impossible to buy game; or when they have risen so greatly in price, that none but people of fortune can buy them. But we are convinced this never can, and never will happen. All the traps and guns in the world, will never prevent the wealth of the merchant and manufacturer from commanding the game of the landed gentleman. You may, in the pursuit of this visionary purpose, render the common people savage, ferocious, and vindictive; you may disgrace your laws by enormous punishments, and the national character by these new secret assassinations; but you will never separate the wealthy glutton from his pheasant. The best way is, to take what you want, and to sell the rest fairly and openly. This is the real spring gun and steel trap which will annihilate, not the unlawful trader, but the unlawful trade.

There is a sort of horror in thinking of a whole land filled with lurking engines of death-machinations against human life under every green tree-traps and guns in every dusky dell and bosky bourn the feræ naturá, the lords of manors eyeing their peasantry as so many butts and marks, and panting to hear the click of the trap, and to see the flash of the gun. How any human being, educated in liberal knowledge and Christian feeling, can doom to certain destruction a poor wretch, tempted by the sight of animals that naturally appear to him to belong to one person as well as another, we are at a loss to conceive. We cannot imagine how he could live in the same village, and see the widow and orphans of the man whose blood he had shed for such a trifle. We consider a person who could do this, to be deficient in the very elements of morals-to want that sacred regard to human life which is one of the corner stones of civil society. If he sacrifices the life of man for his mere pleasures, he would do so, if he dared, for the lowest and least of his passions. He may be defended, perhaps, by the abominable injustice of the Game Laws-though we think and hope he is not. But there rests upon his head, and there is marked in his account, the deep and indelible sin of bloodguiltiness.

ART. VIII. The View, and other Poems. By CHANDOS LEIGH, 12mo. pp. 120. London, 1820.

WE

E have perused, not without pleasure, the small volume that lies before. With no inconsiderable portion of

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