176 OUR BIRD ALLIES. 
should by every law of justice and common sense be 
judged by its doings in Great Britain alone; and we 
may leave agriculturists elsewhere to settle the ques- 
tion independently and for themselves. 
To the frequently-employed argument that sparrows, 
being unduly numerous owing to our persecution of 
the hawks, &c., appointed to prey upon them, must 
be killed off in part, although not entirely, I have 
already referred in the introductory chapter. But 
I may, perhaps, once more be permitted to remark 
that the argument in question is based upon a total 
fallacy. We have killed the hawks, it is true; but 
we have also killed the sparrows. We have killed 
them in the past, and we do kill them in the present. 
Only a day or two before writing these lines I was 
told by a gentleman farming upon a somewhat ex- 
tensive scale that, in the course of the previous week, 
he had paid eight shillings and tenpence for sparrows’ 
eggs taken upon his farms at the rate of three half- 
pence and twopence per dozen; so that, at a low 
computation, seven hundred sparrows’ eggs had been 
destroyed by him during that one week alone. And 
no one with any knowledge of the ways of agricul- 
turists will pretend that this is an isolated instance 
of the persecution which the bird endures at the 
present day. 
And have we not had sparrow-clubs in all parts of 
the country? And have not gardeners and farmers 
trapped and killed the bird in every conceivable 
manner? And have not nest-hunting boys harried 
