One of the most painful symptoms of our social condition
is the growth of habits of lawless violence both in the manufacturing towns and the rural districts. The garotte robberies, in Manches- ter and Birmingham, keep pace with the fatal fights between gamekeepers and poachers in the country. The former seem to indicate the progress of a spirit of Irish Thuggism among the lower classes in cities ; the latter is too nearly allied to the agrarian out- rages of the Irish peasantry. The game-laws—however indefen- sible in many of their features—are inadequate to account for the permanent state of organized war in which the landlords and their servants live with no inconsiderable number of the lower orders. The lawless confederacies of poachers appear to be only one symp- tom of a deep-rooted and widely-spread moral disease—reckless- ness engendered by the precarious existence of extreme poverty, and distrust of law as administered by Justices of the Peace.
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