At a session in Banco on Saturday of the Queen's
Bench Division of the High Court of Justice, Lord Coleridge and Mr. Justice Mellor decided that fox-hunters have no right to trespass on an estate from which they are warned off ; and that the old doctrine that the pursuit of the fox is legal because beneficial to the country at large, as being the pursuit of vermin, does not apply. Every one knows, said the Judges, that even if that doctrine were good law, the fox is not now pursued as vermin ; and that in order to exterminate it as vermin, there is no occasion to take a great hunt over lands whose owner objects ; hence, the old doctrine, even if sound, is irrelevant. So the Somerset- shire fox-hunters who had been convicted and fined for an assault on a farmer who warned them off his land were, said the Judges, rightly convicted, and the appeal on the point of law was dis- missed with costs. That is common-sense. Fox-hunting is, at least, not so sacred and holy an amusement, that it ought to be protected at common law, and authorised to over-ride the usually idolised interests of Property itself.
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