CHAPTER II. 



THE SLAUGHTER OF BIG GAME AND THE GAME 

 LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA. 



IF you had told an average American twenty years ago that before 

 the century would end the enactment of game laws not the mere 

 passing but also their enforcement would become a burning 

 question from the Atlantic to the Pacific, you would have been 

 informed that you knew nothing about " the greatest and freest 

 people on earth." But events march sometimes rather more quickly 

 than the American himself is aware of, and this suggestive sign of 

 up-to-date democracy which is closely copying, in a slightly dis- 

 guised form, the class legislation of effete old feudalism, is the best 

 possible proof, not only of the mellowing effects of time, but also 

 that there is no frontier, no " West," left. That wild game living 

 in a natural state, and therefore, according to the Constitution, the 

 property of the American people as a whole, should ever be made 

 the subject of private ownership, be hedged in by the much- 

 advertised " buffalo and elk proof wire fences," and thereby 

 become the property of the owner of the fence as were it cattle 

 on a ranch, is in itself such a climbing down of the old-fashioned 

 American ideas of freedom, that, while welcoming this end-of-the- 

 century reform, one rubs one's eyes and exclaims, " What next ? " 

 But this chapter has nothing to do with the extensive game 

 parks that multi-millionaires are establishing in many of the 

 Atlantic States, highly useful as they certainly will prove ; * let 



* Similar experiments are now being made also in Western States ; thus, in 

 Wyoming, on ground I knew very well indeed, a large game park is now 



