GAME AND ITS PROTECTION, 15 
of the community should be overcome, and their 
efforts to have good laws passed, and to make them 
effectual, should be sustained. The vulgar idea, 
that confounds laws for the protection of the wild 
creatures of wood, meadow, lake, and stream, with 
the monstrous game-laws of olden time—that made 
killing a hare more criminal than killing a man— 
should be corrected. 
In this country, where every man is expected to 
be a sort of volunteer-policeman, all should unite in 
enforcing the laws; and then, in spite of the irre- 
pressible obstinacy of the German enthusiast, and 
the mean cunning of the sneaking poacher, our 
cities would soon be rid of the disgusting worms 
that make their trees hideous, our farms protected 
from the devastations of the curculio, the weevil, 
the borer, and the army-worm ; the country would 
once more be populated with its native feathered 
game, and our fields would resound with the glad 
songs of the little birds that there build their 
homes. 
So long as the ignorant of our nowveaux riches, 
imagining themselves to be epicures, will pay for 
unseasonable game an extravagant price, so long 
will unscrupulous market-men purchase, and loafing, 
disreputable, tavern-haunting poachers shoot or other- 
wise kill their prey. It must be made a disgrace, 
and if necessary punished as a crime, for any modern 
Lucullus to insult his guests by presenting to them 
game out of season; and eating-house keepers should 
not only be taught—by persistent espionage, if ne- 
