The Commons on Friday week agreed to the Lords' amend-
ments in the Ground-Game Bill, with one complete and one partial exception. The Lords, with a curious, and we confess, to us unintelligible contempt for their tenants' right to make profit of the land, had insisted on securing a close time for hares and rabbits. As this would have led to a multiplication instead of a reduction of the noxious little beasts, the change would have made the measure worse than useless, and it was thrown out without a division. On the other hand, the curious amend-
meat limiting the right of shooting to the farmer or his autho- rised agent was accepted, with the trifling change of " and " for " or." As the farmers will have unlimited right of trapping, this clause will not protect the ground-game, but it will prevent the farmer from letting his friends shoot, or giving shooting parties as the landlord can. It preserves, in fact, the difference of caste between the " gentleman " and the mere " tenant," which turns county society into a life lived in a series of walled-off cells. The arrangement will not, however, be obnoxious to the farmer,. who is thinking of his crops, and not of his right to be an inde- pendent man. He might remonstrate, if ordered to kill all his chickens with his own hands—which would not be a greater interference with his liberty—but he is too glad of the right to kill rabbits anyhow. The Lords accepted the changes, and the Bill passed.
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