CRIMINALITY OF POACHERS. 241 



pocket-handkerchiefs ; and a man has as much right to breed 

 pheasants in his woods, as to walk down the Strand with a 

 silk pocket-handkerchief in his pocket. It is very true that 

 the pheasant stealer may become a highwayman, and in like 

 manner the picker of pockets may become a burglar ; but in 

 neither case should the minor crime be permitted to go un- 

 punished in a vain hope of decreasing the frequency of the 

 greater. Men are very seldom impelled by actual want to 

 take up poaching as a trade ; they are almost always led to 

 it by a natural lawlessness of disposition and a disinclination 

 to labour, or else by a wish to earn the means of indulging in 

 drinking and low profligacy, in the same manner as the 

 young Levi or Moses who picks your pocket spends the 

 proceeds of his booty in some den of infamy in town. I 

 allude, of course, in all I have said, not to the illegal follower 

 of game who is led to do wrong by sportsman-like feelings, 

 but to the desperate and systematic poacher who acts from 

 mere love of gain and utter contempt of right and law, and 

 who too frequently would as soon maltreat or kill a game- 

 keeper who performs his honest duty, as he would shoot a 

 hare. The savage encounters that occasionally occur are 

 invariably commenced by the most lawless and dissolute 

 class of poachers, whose sole object is plunder, and who have 

 not a particle of that love of sport in their composition 

 which so frequently leads the comparatively blameless 

 trespasser into the hands of the law. 



I have entered perhaps too far into a worn-out and 

 unpleasant subject, but I have been led to do so by the 

 honest conviction that, in property of this sort at least, every 

 man has a right to "do what he likes with his own," provided 

 his neighbour does not suffer thereby. 



Rabbits and hares are, like winged game, subject to 

 epidemics, which frequently carry off great numbers. Their 

 diseases can generally be traced to the wet weather or other 

 obvious causes, though sometimes, indeed, these animals 

 disappear almost entirely from a district without any 

 ostensible cause : whether they migrate or perish by disease 

 is a mystery. 



Of late years the mountain-hares in Scotland have in- 

 creased in some places to an almost incredible degree, and 

 hare-shooting in the mountains has occasionally taken the 

 place of grouse-shooting, the birds having died off, while the 

 hares have nourished. Grouse and the mountain -hare feed 



