2 BIG 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 twoclasses. It has been thelove 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 
