We have analysed carefully elsewhere most of Lord Derby's dispassionate
objections to the various plans for improving the position of the agricultural labourer, and for amending the evils resulting from the Game Laws, in his inaugural address to the Lancashire Farmers' Club this day week. We need only add, there- fore, what we omit to mention there, that on the subject of labourers' cottages, so much discussed in our own columns, he holds as a general rule, "subject to exception in the case of large and distant farms, that the landlowner had better not allow the control over them to pass out of his own hands, though he may reasonably make it a condition that those whom he houses at a very unremunerative rent should be actually and habitually workers on his estate." In other words, we suppose he distrusts the prejudices of existing farmers too much to give them the complete control over the labourers' dwellings. On the subject of the game laws, Lord Derby advanced one weighty reason, which we have not quoted elsewhere, against their repeal, viz., that if they were repealed the idle lads of a neighbourhood would be always trespassing in search of game till trespassing became a far greater injury to the farms than the game itself ; and yet that England would never pass a stringent law against trespass, or permit it to be enforced even if it were passed. The answer to that is, we think, that if the game laws were really repealed, no sufficient quantity of game would remain to tempt trespassers to the extent supposed by Lord Derby. But Lord Derby is always a forcible objector.
