492 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Fourthly, a word as to sport. I have invoked the public 

 conscience against wanton destruction and its inevitable accom- 

 paniment of cruelty. I know, further, that man is generally 

 cruel and a bully towards other animals. And, as an extreme 

 evolutionist, I believe all animals are alike in kind, however 

 much they may differ in degree. But I don't think clean sport 

 cruel. It does not add to the sum total of cruelty under present 

 conditions. Wild animals shun pain and death as we do. But 

 under Nature they never die what we call natural deaths. 

 They starve or get killed. Moreover, town-bred humanitarians 

 feel pain and death more than the simpler races of men, who in 

 their turn feel it more than lower animals. A wild animal that 

 has just escaped death will resume its occupation as if nothing 

 had happened. The sportsman's clean kill is only an incident 

 in the day's work, not anxiously apprehended like an operation 

 or a battle. But pain and death are very real, all the same. 

 So death should be inflicted as quickly as possible, even at the 

 risk of losing the rest of one's bag. And, even beyond the 

 reach of any laws, no animal should ever be killed in sport 

 when its own death might entail the lingering death of its 

 young. A sportsman who observes these rules instinctively 

 and who never kills what he cannot get and use is not a cruel 

 man. He certainly is a beast of prey. But so is the most delicate 

 invalid woman when drinking a cup of beef tea v Sport has 

 its use in the development of health and skill and courage. 

 Its practice is one of life's eternal compromises. And the 

 best thing we can do for it now is to make it clean. We 

 have far too much of the other kind. I believe that the 

 enforcement of laws and the establishment of sanctuaries will 

 raise our sport to a higher plane, reduce the suffering now 

 inflicted when killing for business and help in every way 

 towards the conversion of the human into the humane. Besides, 

 paradoxical as it may seem to some good people, the true 

 sportsman has always proved to be one of the very best con- 

 servers of all wild life worth keeping. So there is a distinctly 

 desirable benefit to be expected in this direction, as in every other. 



Finally, I return to my zoophilists, a vast but formless class 

 of people, both in and outside of the other classes mentioned 

 and one which includes every man, woman and child with any 

 fondness for wild life, from zoologist to tourists. There are 

 higher considerations never to be forgotten. But let me first 



