[p. 101]
|101| etc. But the English legislation on property has in these as in many other respects too far towards the freedom of it which it enjoys in the continental countries; all private relations have grown too deeply into these shackles. Moreover, the opening of the possibility for the class engaged in agriculture to acquire landed property, through an alteration of these laws, would be only quite insignificant in proportion to the whole; the weakness of the monarchical power has not been able to watch over that transition; parliamentary legislation remains, even after the Reform Bill, in the hands of that class which has its interest, and still more its rigid habit, in the hitherto existing system of the rights of property, and is hitherto always directed only to remedying the consequences of the system, when the distress and misery become too crying, directly, and thus by palliatives (like the subletting act) or moral wishes (that the Irish landowners might take up their residence in Ireland and the like).
Mention has also been made of the rights of the chase as an object which could be exposed to a reform, – a point the touching of which goes to the heart of so many English Members of Parliament and of their connections; but the abuse and the evils have become too great for an alteration of the laws on this matter not to have had to be brought into agitation; in particular the increase of the affrays and murders committed by the poachers upon the park-keepers, of the loss of game which the landowners suffer in their parks, in particular of the crimes of poaching which come before the courts, yet only a small part of those which are actually committed, then of the harsh, disproportionate penalties which are set upon and imposed for unauthorised hunting – for it is the aristocracy entitled to the chase itself which made these laws and again sits in judgement in the quality of magistrates
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