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quantity of hares and rabbits, which, after all, are the real enemies of the farmer. As a rule small owners, not having extent enough to make it worth their while to preserve, let the right of sport with the land. The case where game damage arises is most commonly the case where the non-resident owner lets the right of sporting to a stranger. The game tenant has only one object, that of keeping up as large a head of game as possible; he cares nothing for injury done to woods or crops. If however the game belonged in the first instance to the occupier, in any agreement between him and his landlord they would have to agree on a definite sum to be deducted from the rent of the farm in respect of the game; and any intending tenant who did not then take into consideration whether the game was to be handed over to a stranger or not, would only have himself to blame. A change in the law too would give opportunities for devising a cheap and satisfactory method of assessing game damages, and perhaps might supply some means of meeting that very difficult question, how A is to be compensated for damage done by game, coming presumably from the lands of B, in some cases even where B is not next neighbour.

Game being thus made property, to take game would be to steal it, and poaching would be simply thieving. Game certificates ought then to be abolished, but not game licences; and the list of game might be extended to other animals not now considered as game. In criminal indictments, the game would be laid as the property of the person on whose occupation it was reduced into possession or found in possession. If the game-stealer-no longer poacher-were taken on a high-road, it might be laid as the property of the road-trustees, the neighbouring occupier, or the parish. The prisoner would have to prove that it was honestly his, or, failing that, his guilt or innocence would be left to a jury.

We cannot help believing that this change in the law would very soon be followed by a change in the public opinion of what may be called the poaching classes. If the man who took chickens and the man who took partridges were visited by a similar punishment before the same bench, or at the same assizes, it would soon be felt that the feudal element in the preservation of game and the freebooting element in its illegal appropriation had disappeared, and that there was left on the one side nothing but a prosaic desire to protect property, and on the other simply the vulgar dishonesty of an ordinary theft. It is true the love of sport will always remain, making a distinction between the taking of game and the taking of

chickens; but, after all, this love of sport is far more generally gratified by the battues and driving parties of the present day, with the numerous beaters, walkers, and attendants which they involve, than it was in the times of a single-barrel Joe Manton and a brace of pointers. The Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers do not differ more from the swallow-tailed coat and cumbrous gaiters of the old Green Man' than do the habits and customs of the sport of our days from the habits and customs of the same sport in the days of our grandfathers. The fox-hound of a century ago, for example, was a slow, deep-voiced, plodding dog with a very delicate nose, following the scent of a fox up to his kennel, hunting him off it, and spending half a morning in killing or losing him. This creature was no more like a modern fox-hound with his dash and fire and immense speed than a spinning jenny is like a powerloom. But in all matters where powder and shot is concerned, everything is changed.

The single barrel flint lock, which missed fire every other time in a damp day, and was so slow that, according to the old phrase, the sportsman had to begin pulling the trigger before he put the gun to his shoulder; the stubble eight inches high, and well overgrown with weeds in those protectionist days, where partridges lay till they were walked up, always the brown bird, never the red-legged variety; the small inclosures surrounded by broad hedgerows, and just suited to the pace of a steady old pointer, who ransacked every corner at a trot, and retrieved his birds; the sportsmen, two at most, satisfied with their ten brace, overjoyed at fifteen, and thinking twenty pleasant but wrong; the same pair engaged in covert-shooting, such as we see it in Stubbs's pictures, with a brace of longhaired, silky-eared, short-legged, nervously hunting spaniels, questing and questing for the sly old cock pheasant whom they followed from one tangle of brambles and underwood to another, till they forced him to spring like a rocket into the air and risk his life in an attempt to escape from persistent persecution; these same spaniels good at flushing the occasional woodcock, followed by cunning noses from his morning feeding ground, full of springs and soft boring' places, to the warm dry retreat under some holly or birch, where he spent his days till flight time ;-all these are gone; and we have in their places, central-fire breech-loaders; mown, almost shorn, stubbles; large fields; cut-down hedgerows; partridges driven into the turnips, and then walked up by four or six gunners with as many beaters; in the place of pointers a contingent of big black retrievers, large enough to swallow whole the birds they

bring so carefully; or later in the season, the driven partridge, giving those splendid rocketing shots which all good sportsmen enjoy, and inferior only to the driven grouse crossing a long Yorkshire moor in swarms with the speed of a six-pounder, or driven black-cock, flying faster, and seeming to fly slower, than any bird of game; and the covert-shooting, which is a holiday for half the village, from the national (we beg pardon, voluntary) school-girl who 'taps' at the corner to keep back the hares and pheasants, upwards through all grades of beaters and 'stops' to the tenants who look on, and the young gentlemen at private tutor' at the vicarage, each attaching himself to a gunner, and keeping the score; the luncheon in the gamekeeper's cottage, sometimes partaken of by certain dainty red petticoats and looped-up skirts ;-but many of our readers know the picture, or can paint it for themselves, not perhaps in the style of certain daily and weekly prints which strain at a battue and swallow a battle.

We repeat that the customs of modern sport are more sociable than those of our forefathers. That it is more cruel to kill two hundred pheasants in a day than two we utterly deny, and if we desire to minimise terror and anxiety for timid creatures, surely the way to do so is to concentrate the chasse in two or three days rather than to diffuse it over half

a season.

We have been drawn away from the purpose and scope of this article by retrospects too pleasant to be altogether passed by, and we shall be accused of partiality in our descriptions. It may be that we are partial, but what we desire is to provide as far as legislation can secure it, that recreations peculiarly English may still be followed, contributing, as we are sure they do, to the formation of an active, energetic, and so to speak, athletic national character, and that in these recreations the tired lawyer, the busy merchant, the belated and exhausted politician may gain, as he has done in past times, refreshment, relaxation, health, and life, with no alloy of regret introduced by the consideration that his sport is obtained at the risk of moral or social degradation for others.

There are many ramifications of this question of Game and Game Laws into which our limits forbid us to enter; but we trust we have said enough to impress on the attention of our readers two facts: first, that the present system requires reform, and secondly, that any reform ought to begin with an attempt to abolish all notions of feudality and privilege with reference to game.

ART. V.-Correspondence between the Governor of the Cape Colony and the President of the Orange Free States, relative to the disputed Ownership of the Diamond Field Territory, presented to the Cape House of Assembly, 1870-1.

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HE recent discovery of diamond fields in South Africa has attracted an unusual amount of attention to that distant region of the world. Nor indeed has the interest awakened in the British mind been alone created by the fact of the probable enrichment of a British colony and the development of the resources of a country in which British power has long been predominant. Other ingredients have not been wanting to sustain the excitement, and the claims advanced by the South African Republic to the territory which has been proved to contain so fertile a source of wealth, have rendered possible, if not probable, complications which can only be understood by those who are content to judge of the condition of the present and the prospects of the future by a careful study of the history of the past. Inasmuch, moreover, as that history will be found to throw some light upon the larger question of the relations existing between this country and her colonies, and the policy which has from time to time guided Great Britain in her conduct towards her distant dependencies, it will be found to possess a general as well as a special interest.

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In order to arrive at a clear understanding of the position which we occupy with regard to the South African diamond fields, it will be necessary briefly to review the history of our possessions in that quarter of the globe, and to point out the course of policy which has brought about the present state of affairs; nor is it improbable that the judgment which may be passed upon it by the impartial critic will be found equally applicable to proceedings in other colonies and under somewhat different circumstances. It is unnecessary to weary reader by a recital of the early history of the Cape, before and after its final acquisition by England in 1806; and indeed for our present purposes it is enough to start from the well-known emigration of the Boers in 1835 and 1836, which took place principally in consequence of the abolition of slavery, and the disputes upon the question of the compensation to be paid to those who had been sufferers by that measure. Nor is it essential to follow the story of that emigration in detail, but simply to point out that from those Dutch colonists who were engaged in it has sprung the race of Boers who are now the occupants of the Orange Free State and Trans Vaal Republics.

A party of emigrant Boers first endeavoured to establish hemselves in Natal, and having been driven thence, fell back pon the large tract of country between the Orange and Vaal ivers, which was at that time thinly populated and afforded ich pasturage for their flocks. The ancient bushmen inhabitints of this country had been gradually dying out for many years past, and at the period of the Boer emigration the greater art of the land was in the undisputed possession of various ative tribes, of whom the Korannas and the Basutos, under he rule of their great chief Moshesh, were among the prinipal, while much land was held by the Griquas, the illegiimate offspring of the white and coloured inhabitants of the colony, who, having adopted this name in place of their first and less euphonious title of Bastards,' had been gradually growing in numbers and importance, and had settled to the east of the confluence of the Orange and Vaal rivers, in some of the most fertile territory of South Africa. It was in the neighbourhood of these people, near to the Orange and Caledon rivers, that the emigrant Boers first established themselves, acknowledging the right of Moshesh and of the Griquas to the land, and taking leases of the same, for which they paid rent to the Griquas, although Moshesh demanded none, being satisfied with the protection afforded by their presence.

This satisfaction, however, was not of long continuance. The innatus amor habendi' (especially where land was concerned) was strong in the Boer nature, and they appear to have become speedily impressed with the idea that they had as good a right to the country as its earlier occupants. The latter, meanwhile, viewed with jealousy the encroachments of the new comers, whose industrious habits and consequent increase of prosperity gradually created a power which rivalled that of their own chiefs, and could hardly be viewed by the latter without apprehension. If, however, the Boers were encroaching, the native tribes were not blameless in their attitude towards their neighbours, against whose flocks and herds they carried on a system of perpetual depredations, which must have been vexatious and irritating in the extreme to the hard-working farmers.

But the Boers had not succeeded in escaping from the reach of the long arm of the British Government by their migration from the Cape. The history of the Orange River Territory during the years 1842-47 inclusive records not only a perpetual strife between the Boers and the native tribes, but also constant attempts on the part of the former to establish themselves independently of the British Government. Their prin

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