xxviii FOREWORD TO FIRST EDITION 



vigorous game, from football to polo, if allowed 

 to become more than a game, and if serious work 

 is sacrificed to its enjoyment, is of course noxious. 

 From the days when Trajan in his letters to Pliny 

 spoke with such hearty contempt of the Greek 

 over-devotion to athletics, every keen thinker has 

 realised that vigorous sports are only good in their 

 proper place. But in their proper place they are 

 very good indeed. The conditions of modern life 

 are highly artificial, and too often tend to a soften- 

 ing of fibre, physical and moral. It is a good 

 thing for a man to be forced to show self-reliance, 

 resourcefulness in emergency, willingness to en- 

 dure fatigue and hunger, and at need to face risk. 

 Hunting is praiseworthy very much in proportion 

 as it tends to develop these qualities. Mr. Baillie- 

 Grohman, to whom most English-speaking lovers 

 of sport owe their chief knowledge of the feats in 

 bygone time of the great hunters of continental 

 Europe, has himself followed in its most manly 

 forms this, the manliest of sports. He has hunted 

 the bear, the wapiti, and the mountain ram in the 

 wildest regions of the Rockies, and, also by fair 

 stalking, the chamois and the red deer in the Alps. 

 Whoever habitually follows mountain game in 

 such fashion must necessarily develop qualities 

 which it is a good thing for any nation to see 

 brought out in its sons. Such sport is as far re- 

 moved as possible from that in which the main 



