2 /;/<, GAME SHOOTING 



animal life taken, and for the time and money spent in the 

 pursuit of wild sport ? 



That, too, is an easy question to answer. Luckily for 

 England, the old hunting spirit is still strong at home, and 

 the men who, had they lived in Arthur's time, might have 

 been knights-errant engaged in some quest at Pentecost, are 

 now constrained to be mere gunners, asking no more than that 

 their hunting-grounds should be wild and remote, their quarry 

 dangerous or all but unapproachable, and the chase such as 

 shall tax human endurance, human craft, and human courage 

 to the uttermost. 



If in these days of ultra-civilisation an apology is needed 

 for such as these, let it be that their sport does no man any 

 harm ; that it exercises all those masculine virtues which set the 

 race where it is among the nations of the earth, and which but 

 for such sport would rust from disuse ; that if the hunter of big 

 game takes life, he often enough stakes his own against the life 

 he takes ; and if he be one of the right sort, he never wastes 

 his game. 



Incidentally, however, the hunter does a good deal for his 

 race and for the men who come after him ; something for 

 science, for exploration, and even for his worst enemy civili- 

 sation. 



In Africa, hunting and exploration have gone hand in 

 hand ; in America the hunters have explored, settled, and de- 

 veloped much of the country, replacing the buffalo with the 

 shorthorn and the Hereford ; while in India, not the least 

 amongst those latent powers which enable us to govern our 

 Asiatic fellow-subjects is the respect won by generations of 

 English hunters from the native shikaries and hillmen. 



From Africa to Siberia the story of exploration has never 

 varied. The world's pioneers have almost invariably belonged to 

 one of two classes. It has been the love of sport, or the lust of gold, 

 which has led men first to break in upon those solitudes in 

 which nature and her wild children have lived alone since the 

 world's beginning. Hunters or gold prospectors still find the 



