CHAPTER XI. 



GAME. 



§ 1. The Problem. 



THE use of land by private individuals for the purpose 

 of preserving game when England is under-culti- 

 vated and the bulk of the population is landless 

 represents to many people the acme of waste and wickedness. 

 To abolish the Game Laws and the " landed " class that 

 administers them, to restore to the people the right both to 

 till the soil and to enjoy the outdoor pleasures of country life, 

 to turn our countryside from the pleasure-ground of the rich 

 to the treasure house of the ordinary citizen, these are aims 

 which figure largely among the stock-in-trade of a certain 

 type of political orator, and appeal, as indeed it is right 

 they should appeal, to the imagination of a proletariat that 

 feels itself disinherited. The only pity is that those aims are 

 usually lost in generalities, and that their advance is 

 marked too often by ignorance of the main factors of the 

 problem, which must be grasped and taken into account in 

 any serious attempt to formulate a policy for the land. 



Three considerations must be urged not as an argument 

 in favour of private game-preserving, but in order to make 

 clear that many of the natural features which are incidental 

 to game-preserving must be preserved for their own sake, 

 and that the displacement of labour and values involved in 

 its abolition must be provided for in the new order of things. 

 For a new order is imperatively necessary, in view of the 

 damage and waste to the countryside and the cruel privation 

 to the individual, due to the callous stupidity of a system 

 which hands over the land of England as a plaything to the 

 irresponsible few. 



In the first place it must be recognised that, even from the 

 point of view of agriculture, it is a good thing that there 

 should exist all over the country those spots of wild beauty 



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