250 SHOOTING THE PARTRIDGE 
policy of the gentlemen to whom I have referred, they 
can never again be 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 
