288 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP 



Next to eating, fighting, in one form or another, 

 is the favourite pursuit of men nearly everywhere 

 on holy days and days of leisure. Whenever 

 human beings have any energy or time left over 

 from what they are required to spend in maintain- 

 ing their existence, they use it in fighting some- 

 body or in watching somebody else fight. And 

 generally the more brutal and sanguinary the 

 conflict, the more popular and satisfying it is. 

 Witness the bull-fights and cock-fights of Spain 

 and Mexico, the fisticuffs of Anglo-Saxons, and 

 the baseball and slugball battles of the Americans, 

 where eager thousands gather and roar for hours 

 like hysterical idiots simply to see one animal or 

 set of animals punish or discredit another. If 

 there are no pigeons to shoot, or if the community 

 is ruled by men and women who are too eman- 

 cipated to allow such things, we make glass birds 

 and heroically bang away at them, supplying by 

 our imaginations the blood and agony of real 

 carnage. And if we can't do anything else, we 

 take some poor pig, that never did anyone any 

 harm in the world, and grease it and turn it loose, 

 and then take after it with knives, as Chicago 

 butchers do on vacation days, and see who can 

 cut its throat the quickest. This amusement, in 

 pure barbarity, certainly stands pretty near the 

 top in the list of human pastimes so far invented. 

 Maybe it is outclassed by that other contest some- 

 times advertised as a feature of butchers' bar- 

 becues, in which a band of professional cut- 

 throats compete to see who can kill, skin, and 



