REFORM ADVOCATED 241 



Crown will lose by any such attempt. By greater economy of 

 labour, and by stopping entirely the system of peculation and 

 robbery hitherto carried on, a better face may be put on the 

 returns ; but nothing near so good a one as might have been 

 achieved by judicious management under former circumstances. 

 We will say that, by planting, the Crown will get rid of some of 

 the common-right (I take that to be an idea that is in the mind 

 of the Commission) ; also that, by the refusal to admit the run 

 of milch cows, they starve out the poor, and get rid, in the event 

 of a general enclosure, of the demand made in lieu of their kine : 

 still I maintain that the forest soil, by planting or by cultivation 

 well done by, as the plantations are under Mr. Cumberbatch 

 acknowledging as little common-right as possible, can never be 

 made to return any remuneration for the immense amount of 

 labour which will be exhausted upon it. As to the sporting 

 prospects in black-game and pheasant, the newly-cut drains, and 

 their extent in the new enclosures, will do more to diminish the 

 number of those birds than the Act postponing all shooting till 

 the first of October achieved in their favour. The old hen-bird 

 with her brood hops easily across one of these ditches; but 

 her recently hatched young, in endeavouring to follow her, in- 

 variably, from the width and steepness of the sides of the drain, 

 fall in, when they either perish on the spot or are carried off by 

 the run of water. Some foolish persons, called forest-keepers, 

 exclaim, "What good will these great enclosures do to the 

 black-game ? " but, as they are men who look no more into the 

 bottom of a drain than they do into any other place where they 

 might " pad " a vermin or catch a thief, their opinion may go 

 for what it is worth. The forest with its deer was a happy and 

 contented land once, and might have been made still more so in 

 the way I have pointed out. It is now a sad, a discontented, 

 and a complaining waste, not much of a nursery for timber, but 

 a wide field for the nurture of crime and incendiarism, produced 

 by the Act of Parliament brought in by Lord Seymour and the 

 Whigs. I do not stir a step in the forest without hearing com- 

 plaints from man and woman as to the restrictions of the new 



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