THE PRESERVATION OF GAME 173 



civilising influences, natural instincts survive ? Your 

 infant recapitulates the crude impulses of his long forgotten 

 ancestors. " Surely they dwell," as Stevenson so aptly 

 puts it in his entertaining but philosophical article on 

 " Child's Play," " in a mythological epoch and are not the 

 contemporaries of their parents." 



The humane sportsman, if asked for arguments in 

 favour of his pastime, will tell us that exercise in the open 

 air, the necessary sharpening of the wits, and the pitting 

 of knowledge and power against the inborn wariness of 

 wild creatures, is health-giving and exhilarating. If he 

 stops there he is right ; if he adds, as some will, elevating, 

 we demur. Familiarity with death, even of the meanest 

 creatures, is apt to dull the sensibilities; after that it is an 

 easy step to thoughtless cruelty, and thence to pleasure 

 in giving pain. Blood lust, unfortunately, is no unknown 

 disease. 



Twenty years ago I stated that whilst deploring the 

 massacre of wild animals I believed that were sports of 

 the chase to lose all hold upon our countrymen, Britons 

 would also lose much of the energy and grit by which the 

 Empire was upbuilt. We have learnt hard practical 

 lessons since then, and we wonder if much of this grit 

 and energy was misplaced. How we might have colonised 

 may be learnt from the early history of Pennsylvania, 

 where there was no lack of true grit and energy, tempered 

 by wise statesmanship. What we should never forget is 

 the story of Tasmania, and our hands were not always 

 clean in India, South Africa, and in many of those glorious 

 victories which our history books paint in such glowing 

 colours. 



This, however, does not alter the fact that the real 

 sportsman must be a man of untiring zeal and energy, 

 a man of muscle and yet of brain. All outdoor sports, un- 

 less indulged in to excess, are health-giving; those savage 



