subject is of too much interest to be crowded into the brief limits of this chapter. We must content ourselves with some general statements of the burdens and injustice that have pressed on the poor of England up to the present time, and the introduction of a few specific facts for illustration.

It is probably well known to every reader, that in all ages the great majority of the British people have been entirely subjected to the control of the throne and the aristocracy; that their rights have been disregarded and trampled down; that neither they, nor the tyrants who made their fetters, seem ever to have thought that the great object of government and civilized society should be the greatest good of the greatest number. In tracing back the history of England, we find that in the early ages, the people were in a state of abject slavery. At the Norman Conquest, the Feudal System, which had been partially introduced into England, was fully established, and continued for several centuries in all its vigor and despotism. A false conception of the Feudal System seems very generally to prevail, even at the present time. All the charms of romantic legends have been thrown around this grand, but gloomy structure; and in the gorgeous array of Chivalry, Crusades, Knights, and Tournaments, the imagination of the reader is dazzled into forgetfulness of the uninstructed, neglected, degraded masses, the story of whose wrongs no one has been found willing to tell-for we find it no where written.

After one of the victorious battles of the Ameri can Revolution, as Washington and Lafayette were walking over the field of blood, the Father of his Country, with one hand resting on the shoulder of the young French soldier, and the other pointing to the dead bodies of his brave men, said: "My brave Marquis, the time will come when the memory of these fallen men will be an inheritance worth more than gold to their descendants. It seems to be the decision of God that history should preserve the names and the remembrance of patriots who die for liberty and their country, while those who fall in conquests of blood and ambition shall be forgotten. The memory of these men who have fallen to-day will never be forgotten." How few of those who have died in battle have fallen in the cause of liberty! All through the dark ages the people of England were driven from their homes to shed their blood, not in the defence of their freedom, but in gratifying the ambition of their rulers. Few things are more lamentable in history than this tyrannical power the few have exercised over the multitude. The game and policy of war is well described by the humane Carlyle; "What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil in British village of Dumdrudge usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain 'natural enemies' of the French, there are successively selected during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected, all dressed in red, and shipped away at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now, to that same spot in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition; and thirty stands fronting thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word 'fire!' is given; and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the devil is, not the smallest ! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers. Nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot." This is a real picture-its like has been seen on many thousand battle-fields. What cares the master for the sacri

fice of his slave, if it but gratify his ambition. Human life is dog-cheap till he comes to sell his own. It is surely lamentable enough to think how the mass have always been made "hewers of wood and drawers of water," to those who happened to possess the power at the time.

We have not space to speak at length of serfs and vassals who composed the large majority of the people, and who had no appeal from the will of their masters. So deeply were the millions degraded, that " the serf," we are told by De Tocqueville, "looked upon his own inferiority as a consequence of the immutable order of nature." How grinding and lasting must have been the tyranny that brought him so low.

Man has never yet been rightly estimated. Those who are familiar with the forest and game laws, know the comparative value English kings have placed upon a man and the game of the woods. William the Conqueror, "not satisfied with sixty-nine forests, lying in almost every part of the kingdom, such, and so many, says Evelyn, as no other realm of Europe had, laid waste a vast tract of country in Hampshire, and created another, thence called New Forest, because it was the last added to the ancient ones, except that of Hampton Court, the work of Henry VIII. Such was the origin and extent of the ancient royal forests of England; all preserved and maintained for the especial and exclusive pastime of the kings. Truly the state of a king was then kingly indeed. Sixty-nine forests, thirteen chases, and upwards of seven hundred and fifty parks existing in England. There were in Yorkshire alone in Henry VIII's time, two hundred and seventy-five woods, besides parks and chases, most of them containing five hundred acres. Over all these the king could sport, for it was the highest honor to a subject to receive a visit from the king to hunt in his chase, or free warren; while no subject, except by special permission and favor, could hunt in the royal parks. These sixty-nine forests of immense extent, lying in all parts of England, and occupying no small portion of its surface, all stood then for the sole gratification of the royal pleasure of the chase, and supplying the king's household, and few persons have now any idea of the state, dignity, and systematic severity of this great hunting establishment of England, maintained through all succeeding reigns to the time of the Commonwealth, and some parts of it much longer."

During one of my rides through Essex, in the summer of 1840, I took up an ancient book on the Game Laws of England, which I found in turning over the antique library of my host, from which I gathered the following information. William the Conquerer decreed that the eyes of any person should be pulled out who killed either a buck or a boar in the royal hunting grounds. Rufus had any man Langed who stole a doe.