250 SHOOTING THE PARTRIDGE 



policy of the gentlemen to whom I have referred, they 

 can never again he made a party question. As well 

 expect to make political capital out of the law of 

 divorce, or the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, which 

 has long ago shuffled together the division lists of the 

 House of Commons. In the midst of your polemics 

 you find that the distinguished Radical barrister or 

 manufacturer has taken heavily to game-preserving, 

 while your Tory peer, preferring foreign travel or 

 scientific study to shooting, has surrendered all his 

 sporting rights to his tenantry. 



The late Mr. Peter Taylor, M.P., who was about 

 as good a judge of the relations between landlord, 

 tenant, and labourer as a. modern alderman would be 

 of a Roman triumph, loudly demanded and eventually 

 obtained the last Select Committee on the Game Laws, 

 twenty years ago. His discomfiture was complete 

 when it was found that the great weight of evidence 

 given by farmers was in favour of retaining them. 

 There has never been another Select Committee, 

 and I make bold to say there never will be. It is 

 dangerous to prophesy, yet I think it is not difficult 

 to see that the Royal Commission on Deer Forests, 

 which is now wasting the taxpayers' money in a search 

 for good agricultural land among the misty corries 

 and rocky passes of the Highlands, will have no 



