ing for the rights--and for something beyond the rights--of
your own property, but you are oblivious to its duties. How many lives
have been sacrificed during the past year to the childish infatuation of
preserving game? The noble lord, the member for North Lancashire, could
tell of a gamekeeper killed in an affray on his father's estate in that
county. For the offense one man was hanged, and four men are now on
their way to penal colonies. Six families are thus deprived of husband
and father, that this wretched system of game-preserving may be
continued in a country densely peopled as this is. The Marquis of
Normanby's gamekeeper has been murdered also, and the poacher who shot
him only escaped death by the intervention of the Home Secretary. At
Godalming, in Surrey, a gamekeeper has been murdered; and at Buckhill,
in Buckinghamshire, a person has recently been killed in a poaching
affray. This insane system is the cause of a fearful loss of life; it
tends to the ruin of your tenantry, and is the fruitful cause of the
demoralization of the peasantry. But you are caring for the rights of
property; for its most obvious duties you have no concern. With such a
policy, what can you expect but that which is now passing before you?

It is the remark of a beautiful writer that "to have known nothing but
misery is the most portentous condition under which human nature can
start on its course." Has your agricultural laborer ever known anything
but misery? He is born in a miserable hovel, which in mockery is termed
a house or a home; he is reared in penury: he passes a life of hopeless
and unrequited toil, and the jail or the union house is before him as
the only asylum on this side of the pauper's grave. Is this the result
of your protection to native industry? Have you cared for the laborer
till, from a home of comfort, he has but a hovel for shelter? and have
you cherished him into starvation and rags? I tell you what your boasted
protection is--it is a protection of native idleness at the expense of
the impoverishment of native industry.

FROM THE SPEECH ON NON-RECOGNITION OF THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY (1861)

I advise you, and I advise the people of England, to abstain from
applying to the United States doctrines and principles which we never
apply to our own case. At any rate, they [the Americans] have never
fought "for the balance of power" in Europe. They have never fought to
keep up a decaying empire. They have never squa