The Merry Past 



ally produced the poacher. More often than not 

 he has come to regard it merely as an amusement for 

 the city gentleman from London, who has taken the 

 " big house," and some who draw their ideas from 

 the more hysterical portion of the Press have become 

 openly hostile. 



At the present time even the more reputable forms 

 of sport which survive are a constant object of attack 

 from many a quarter, and without doubt the House 

 of Lords alone prevents a few of them from being 

 suppressed under the maudlin pretext of enforcing 

 that peculiar form of sentimentalism which dubs 

 itself Humanitarian. 



The puling cant of overweening morality, with 

 which the present day so much abounds, would, if 

 given a free rein, prohibit all sport which humani- 

 tarians have the effrontery to declare tends towards 

 the unnecessary destruction of animal life, and is 

 therefore contrary to Nature ! She, as every observer 

 of wild life knows, is absolutely ruthless with regard to 

 her children. Instead, then, of inveighing against 

 sportsmen who are generally humane men, let these 

 same humanitarians arraign the wisdom by which such 

 things are permitted to be, and send forth their 

 whining complaints that the lion was not born to 

 feed on grass, and the tiger on wild herbs. 



The occasionally tolerated brutality of the eigh- 

 teenth century has, of late years, become transformed 

 into a supersensitive sentimentality, which is without 

 doubt a very significant and dangerous symptom of 

 the (let it be hoped) temporary decay of vitality 



S 



