in the Carolinas is a provincial law as old as 1740, but made perpetual in 1783. By this law it is enacted, that every negro shall be presumed a slave, unless the contrary appear. The 9th clause allows two justices of the peace, and three freeholders, power to put them to any manner of death; the evidence against them may be without oath-No slave is to traffic on his own account. Any person murdering a slave is to pay 100%.—or 147, if he cuts out the tongue of a slave.—Any white man meeting seven slaves together on a high road may give them twenty Lashes each.-No man must teach a slave to write, under penalty of 100% currency. We have Mr. Hall's authority for the existence and enforcement of this law at the present day. Mr. Fearon has recorded some facts still more instructive. *Observing a great many coloured people, particularly females, in these boats, I concluded that they were emigrants, who had proceeded thus far on their route towards a settlement. The fact proved to be, that fourteen of the flats were freighted with human beings for sale. They had been collected in the several States by slave dealers, and shipped from Kentucky for a market, They were dressed up to the best advantage, on the same principle that jockeys do horses upon sale. The following is a specimen of advertisement on this subject: "TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD Will be paid for apprehending and lodging in gaol, or delivering to the subscribers, the following slaves, belonging to JOSEPH IRVIN, of Iberville.-TOM, a very light Mulatto, blue eyes, 5 feet 10 inches high, appears to be about 35 years of age; an artful fellowcan read and write, and preaches occasionally.-CHARLOTTE, a black wench, round, and full faced, tall, straight, and likelyabout 25 years of age, and wife of the above named Tom.-These slaves decamped from their owner's plantation on the night of the 14th September inst.'"- (Fearon, p. 270.) "The three African churches,' as they are called, are for all those native Americans who are black, or have any shade of colour darker than white. These persons, though many of them are possessed of the rights of citizenship, are not admitted into the churches which are visited by whites. There exists a penal law, deeply written in the mind of the whole white population, which subjects their coloured fellow-citizens to unconditional contumely and never-c‹ a3ing insult. No respectability, however unquestionable-no property, however large gain a man, whose body is (in American -no character, however unblemished, will estimation) cursed with even a twentieth portion of the blood of his African ancestry, admission into society!!! They are considered as mere Pariahs-as outcasts and vagrants upon the face of the earth! I make no reflection upon these things, but leave the facts for your consideration."(Fearon, pp. 168, 169.) That such feelings and such practices should exist among men who know the value of liberty, and profess to understand its principles, is the consummation of wickedness. Every American who loves his country should dedicate his whole life, and every faculty of his soul, to efface this foul stain from its character. If nations rank according to their wisdom and their virtue, what murderer of slaves, to compare himright has the American, a scourger and self with the least and lowest of the European nations?-much more with this great and humane country, where the greatest lord dare not lay a finger upon the meanest peasant? What is freedom where all are not free? where the greatest of God's blessings is limited, with impious caprice, to the colour of the body? And these are the men who taunt the English with their corrupt Parliament, with their buying and which is the most liable to censure— selling votes. Let the world judge we who, in the midst of our rottenness, have torn off the manacles of slaves all over the world;- -or they who, with their idle purity, and useless perfection, have remained mute and careless, while groans echoed and whips clanked round We wish well to America the very walls of their spotless Congress. -we rejoice in her prosperity-and are delighted to resist the absurd impertinence with which the character of her people is often treated in this country: but the existence of slavery in America is an atrocious crime, with which no measures can be kept-for which her situation affords no sort of apology—which makes liberty itself distrusted, and the boast of it disgusting. As for emigration, every man, of England is, to be sure, a very expensive country; but a million of millions has been expended in making it habitable and comfortable; and this is a constant source of revenue, or, what is the same thing, a constant diminution of expense to every man living in it. The price an Englishman pays for a turnpike road is not equal to a tenth part of what the delay would cost him without a turnpike. The New River Company brings water to every inhabitant of London, at an infinitely less price than he could dip for it out of the Thames. No country, in fact, is so expensive as one which human beings are just beginning to inhabit;- where there are no roads, no bridges, no skill, no help, no combination of powers, and no force of capital. course, must determine for himself. A on the Columbia should have common carpenter, under 30 years of age, who interest with the navigators of the finds himself at Cincinnati with an axe Hudson and the Delaware. over his shoulder, and ten pounds in his pocket, will get rich in America if the change of climate does not kill him. So will a farmer who emigrates early with some capital. But any person with tolerable prosperity here had better remain where he is. There are considerable evils, no doubt, in England: but it would be madness not to admit, that it is, upon the whole, a very happy country, and we are much mistaken if the next 20 years will not bring with it a great deal of internal improvement. The country has long been groaning under the evils of the greatest foreign war we were ever engaged in; and we are just beginning to look again into our home affairs. Political economy has made an astonishing progress since they were last investigated; and every session of Parliament brushes off some of the cobwebs and dust of our ancestors.* The Apprentice Laws have been swept away; the absurd nonsense of the Usury Laws will probably soon follow; Public Education and Saving Banks have been the invention of these last ten years; and the strong fortress of Bigotry has been rudely assailed. Then, with all its defects, we have a Parliament of inestimable value. If there be a place in any country where 500 well educated men can meet together, and talk with impunity of public affairs, and if what they say is published, that country must improve. It is not pleasant to emigrate into a country of changes and revolution, the size and integrity of whose empire no man can predict. The Americans are a very sensible, reflecting people, and have conducted their affairs extremely well; but it is scarcely possible to conceive How, too, can any man take upon himself to say, that he is so indifferent to his country that he will not begin to love it intensely, when he is 5000 or 6000 miles from it? And what a dreadful disease Nostalgia must be on the banks of the Missouri! Severe and painful poverty will drive us all anywhere: but a wise man should be quite sure he has so irresistible a plea before he ventures on the Great or the Little Wabash. He should be quite sure that he does not go there from ill temper-or to be pitied- or to be regretted or from ignorance of what is to happen to him-or because he is a poet-but because he has not enough to eat here, and is sure of abundance where he is going. that such an empire should very long GAME LAWS. (E. REVIEW, 1819.) remain undivided, or that the dwellers In a scarcity which occurred little more than 20 years ago, every judge, (except the Lord Chancellor, then Justice of the Common Pleas, and Serjeant Remington,) when they charged the Grand Jury, attributed the scarcity to the combinations of the farmers; and complained of it as a very serious evil. Such doctrines would not now be tolerated in the mouth of a school-boy. Three Letters on the Game Laws. Rest Fenner, Black & Co. London. 1818. THE evil of the Game Laws, in their present state, has long been felt, and of late years has certainly rather increased than diminished. We believe that they cannot long remain in their present state; and we are anxious to express our opinion of those changes which they ought to experience. We thoroughly acquiesce in the importance of encouraging those field sports which are so congenial to the habits of Englishmen, and which, in the present state of society, afford the only effectual counterbalance to the allurements of great towns. We cannot conceive a more pernicious condition for a great nation, than that its aristocracy should be shut up from one year's end to another in a metropolis, while the mass of its rural inhabitants are left to the management of factors and agents. A great man returning from London to spend his summer in the country diffuses intelligence, improves manners, communicates pleasure, restrains the extreme violence of subordinate politicians, and makes the middling and lower classes better acquainted with, and more attached to their natural leaders. At the same time, a residence in the country gives to the makers of laws an opportunity of studying those interests which they may afterwards be called upon to protect and arrange. Nor is it unimportant to the character of the higher orders themselves, that they should pass a considerable part of the year in the midst of these their larger families; that they should occasionally be thrown among simple, laborious, frugal people, and be stimulated to resist the prodigality of Courts, by viewing with their own eyes the merits and the wretchedness of the poor. Laws for the preservation of Game are not only of importance, as they increase the amusements of the country, but they may be so constructed as to be perfectly just. The game which my land feeds is certainly mine; or, in other words, the game which all the land feeds certainly belongs to all the owners of the land: and the only practical way of dividing it is, to give to each proprietor what he can take on his own ground. Those who contribute nothing to the support of the animal, can have no possible right to a share in the distribution. To say of animals, than they are fera Natura means only, that the precise place of their birth and nature is not known. How they shall be divided, is a matter of arrangement among those whose collected property certainly has produced and fed them: but the case is completely made out against those who have no land at all, and who cannot therefore have been in the slightest degree instrumental to their production. If a large pond were divided by certain marks into four parts, and allotted to that number of proprietors, the fish contained in that pond would be, in the same sense, feræ Naturâ. Nobody could tell in which particular division each carp had been born and bred. The owners would arrange their respective rights and pretensions in the best way they could: but the clearest of all possible propositions would be, that the four proprietors, among them, made a complete title to all the fish; and that nobody but them had the smallest title to the smallest share. This we say, in answer to those who contend that there is no foundation for any system of Game Laws; that animals born wild are the property of the public; and that their appropriation is nothing but tyranny and usurpation. In addition to these arguments, it is perhaps scarcely necessary to add, that nothing which is worth having, which is accessible, and supplied only in limited quantities, could exist at all, if it was not considered as the property of some individual. If everybody might take game wherever they found it, there would soon be an end of every species of game. The advantage would not be extended to fresh classes, but be annihilated for all classes. Besides all this, the privilege of killing game could not be granted, without the privilege of trespassing on landed property;· an intolerable evil, which would entirely destroy the comfort and privacy of a country life. But though a system of Game Laws is of great use in promoting country amusements, and may, in itself, be placed on a footing of justice, its effects, we are sorry to say, are by no means favourable to the morals of the poor. It is impossible to make an unedu cated man understand in what manner | rule is not quite so inflexible, though a bird hatched, nobody knows where in principle not very different.-But to-day living in my field, to-morrow we shall speak to the case which con in yours should be as strictly pro- cerns by far the greatest number; and perty as the goose whose whole history certainly it is scarcely possible to ima can be traced, in the most authentic and gine a more absurd and capricious satisfactory manner, from the egg to limitation. For what possible reason the spit. The arguments upon which is a man, who has only 901. per annum this depends are so contrary to the in land, not to kill the game which his notions of the poor-so repugnant to own land nourishes? If the Legislature their passion and, perhaps, so much really conceives, as we have heard surabove their comprehension, that they mised by certain learned squires, that are totally unavailing. The same man a person of such a degree of fortune who would respect an orchard, a gar- should be confined to profitable pur den, or a hen-roost, scarcely thinks he suits, and debarred from that pernicious is committing any fault at all in invad- idleness into which he would be betrayed ing the game covers of his richer by field sports, it would then be expe neighbour; and as soon as he becomes dient to make a qualification for bowls wearied of honest industry, his first or skittles-to prevent small landowners resource is in plundering the rich from going to races, or following a pack magazine of hares, pheasants, and of hounds- and to prohibit to men of partridges the top and bottom dishes, a certain income, every other species which on every side of his village are of amusement as well as this. The only running and flying before his eyes. instance, however, in which this pa As these things cannot be done with ternal care is exercised, is that in which safety in the day, they must be done in the amusement of the smaller landthe night ;-and in this manner a law-owner is supposed to interfere with less marauder is often formed, who proceeds from one infringement of law and property to another, till he becomes a thoroughly bad and corrupted member of society. those of his richer neighbour. He may do what he pleases, and elect any other species of ruinous idleness but that in which the upper classes of society are his rivals. Nay, the law is so excessively ridiculous in the case of small landed proprietors, that on a property of less than 100% per annum, no human being has the right of shooting. It is not confined, but annihilated. The lord of the manor may be warned off by the proprietor; and the proprietor may be These few preliminary observations lead naturally to the two principal considerations which are to be kept in view, in reforming the Game Laws ;to preserve, as far as is consistent with justice, the amusements of the rich, and to diminish, as much as possible, the temptations of the poor. And these ends, it seems to us, will be best an-informed against by anybody who sees swered, 1. By abolishing qualifications. 2. By giving to every man a property in the game upon his land. 3. By allow ing game to be bought by anybody, and sold by its lawful possessors.* Nothing can be more grossly absurd than the present state of the Game Laws, as far as they concern the qualification for shooting. In England, no man can possibly have a legal right to kill game, who has not 100l. a year in land rent. With us in Scotland, the All this has since been done. him sporting. The case is still stronger in the instance of large farms. In Northumberland, and on the borders of Scotland, there are large capitalists, who farm to the amount of two or three thousand per annum, who have the permission of their distant nonresident landlords to do what they please with the game, and yet who dare not fire off a gun upon their own land. Can anything be more utterly absurd and preposterous, than that the landlord and the wealthy tenant together cannot make up a title to the hare which is fattened upon the choicest produce of their land? That the land- qualification for any amusement is wealth, let it be any proveable wealth— Dives agris, dives positis in fœnore nummis. lord, who can let to farm the fertility of the land for growing wheat cannot let to farm its power of growing partridges? That he may reap by deputy, bat cannot on that manor shoot by deputy? Is it possible that any respectable magistrate could fine a farmer for killing a hare upon his own grounds with his landlord's consent, without feeling that he was violating every feeling of common sense and justice? Since the enactment of the Game Laws, there has sprung up an entirely new species of property, which of course is completely overlooked by their provisions. An Englishman may possess a million of money in funds, or merchandise — may be the Baring or the Hope of Europe-provide to Government the sudden means of equipping fleets and armies, and yet be without the power of smiting a single partridge, though invited by the owner of the game to participate in his amusement. It is idle to say that the difficulty may be got over, by purchasing land: the question is, upon what principle of justice can the existence of the difficulty be defended? If the right of keeping men-servants were confined to persons who had more than 100%. a year in the funds, the difficulty might be got over by every man who could change his landed property to that extent. But what could justify so capricious a partiality to one species of property? There might be some apology for such laws at the time they were made but there can be none for their not being now accommodated to the changes which time has introduced. If you choose to exclude poverty from this species of amusement, and to open it to wealth, why is it not open to every species of wealth? What amusement can there be morally lawful to a holder of turnip land, and criminal in a possessor of Exchequer bills? What delights ought to be tolerated to Long Annuities, from which wheat and beans should be excluded? What matters it whether it is scrip or short-horned cattle? If the locus quo is conceded -if the trespass is waived-and if the It will be very easy for any country gentleman who wishes to monopolise to himself the pleasure of shooting, to let to his tenant every other right attached to the land, except the right of killing game; and it will be equally easy, in the formation of a new Game Act, to give to the landlord a summary process against his tenant, if such tenant fraudulently exercise the privileges he has agreed to surrender. The case which seems most to alarm country gentlemen, is that of a person possessing a few acres in the heart of a manor, who might, by planting food of which they are fond, allure the game into his own little domain, and thus reap a harvest prepared at the expense of the neighbour who surrounded him. But, under the present Game Laws, if the smaller possession belong to a qualified person, the danger of intrusion is equally great as it would be under the proposed alteration; and the danger from the poacher would be the same in both cases. But if it be of such great consequence to keep clear from all interference, may not such a piece of land be rented or bought? Or, may not the food which tempts game be sown in the same abundance in the surrounding as in the enclosed land? After all, it is only common justice, that he whose property is surrounded on every side by a preserver of game, whose corn and turnips are demolished by animals preserved for the amusement of his neighbour, should himself be entitled to that share of game which plunders upon his land. The complaint which the landed grandee makes is this. "Here is a man who has only a twenty-fourth part of the land, and he expects a twentyfourth part of the game. He is so captious and litigious, that he will not be contented to supply his share of the food, without requiring his share of what the food produces. I want a neighbour who has talents only for suffering, not one who evinces such a fatal disposition for enjoying." Upon |