Nature's Militia 271 



came regularly every autumn, nearly a million arriving 

 daily for ten days, and they gave them a warm, reception. 

 Hundreds of the population v^rent out to meet them, 

 armed with guns, and there was a regular battue. How 

 many »vere slain history does not say, but the numbers 

 must have been very great. They did not die unavenged, 

 however; for every lark killed left so many more insects 

 to rav ige the crops; and when people woke up enough to 

 put tv o and two together, and to connect the plagues of 

 insect . with the destruction of the "militia" which should 

 have :ept them under, measures were taken to check the 

 persecution. 



To some extent birds are now protected in Europe; 

 but we do not seem to have learned our lesson even yet, for 

 a cry that the birds are being exterminated is now making 

 itself heard in Asia, Africa, and America. The war 

 carried on against them in India is already having very 

 serious results; the swamps and marshes of Florida are 

 being depopulated; Guinea is being despoiled of its birds 

 of paradise, and birds of bright plumage are becoming 

 more and more rare everywhere all over the world. 



And why all this slaughter? Not because there is a 

 famine in the land, and the birds are needed for food; not 

 even for the sake of "sport"; but because the fashionable 

 women of Paris, London, and Vienna require the sacrifice 

 of at least thirty million birds every year, that they may 

 decorate themselves with feathers. 



In India, which furnishes hundreds of thousands of 

 skins every year, insect life is rampant beyond anything 

 that we have experience of, and is "only kept within 

 bounds by the utmost effort of all the checks provided by 

 nature." The "patient, unpaid labor of the useful small 



