h game-laws, interspersed with
sundry anecdotes of poachers and poaching. Bertram listened with an
interested but gravely disapproving face. "And do you mean to say,"
he asked at last "they send men to prison as criminals for catching or
shooting hares and pheasants?"

"Why, certainly," Philip answered. "It's an offence against the law, and
also a crime against the rights of property."

"Against the law, yes; but how on earth can it be a crime against the
rights of property? Obviously the pheasant's the property of the man who
happens to shoot it. How can it belong to him and also to the fellow who
taboos the particular piece of ground it was snared on?"

"It doesn't belong to the man who shoots it at all," Philip answered,
rather angrily. "It belongs to the man who owns the land, of course, and
who chooses to preserve it."

"Oh, I see," Bertram replied. "Then you disregard the rights of property
altogether, and only consider the privileges of taboo. As a principle,
that's intelligible. One sees it's consistent. But how is it that you
all allow these chiefs--landlords, don't you call them?--to taboo the
soil and prevent you all from even walking over it? Don't you see that
if you chose to combine in a body and insist upon the recognition of
your natural rights,--if you determined to make the landlords give up
their taboo, and cease from injustice,--they'd have to yield to you, and
then you could exercise your native right of going where you pleased,
and cultivate the land in common for the public benefit, instead of
leaving it, as now, to be cultivated anyhow, or turned into waste for
the benefit of the tabooers?"

"But it would be WRONG to take it from them," Philip cried, growing
fiery red and half losing his temper, for he really believed it. "It
would be sheer confiscation; the land's their own; they either bought it
or inherited it from their fathers. If you were to begin taking it away,
what guarantee would you have left for any of the rights of property
generally?"

"You didn't recognise the rights of property of the fellow who killed
the pheasant, though," Bertram interposed, laughing, and imperturbably
good-humoured. "But that's always the way with these taboos, everywhere.
They subsist just because the vast majority even of those who are
obviously wronged and injured by them really believe in them. They think
they're guaranteed by some divine prescription. The fetich guards them.
In Polynesia, I recolle