Relation of Wild Life to the Public 387 



future generations unharmed, they must in the main remain wild. 

 No one can safely assume that he is able to tell how valuable these 

 regions will become in the future, when properly stocked. When 

 once a plant or an animal becomes extinct it is beyond human power 

 to restore it. We can well afford to play safe in such matters. 

 Sir Harry H. Johnston, a member of the Honorary Advisory Coun- 

 cil of the Roosevelt Wild Life Station, has very well said that: 



"The world will become very uninteresting if man and his few 

 domestic animals, together with the rat, mouse, and sparrow are 

 its only inhabitants. Man's interests must come first, but those 

 very interests demand food for the intellect. Aesthetically, the 

 egret, toucan, bird of paradise, grebe, sable, chinchilla, and fur-seal 

 are as important as the well-dressed woman. The viper, lion, tiger, 

 crocodile, wolf, vulture, and rhinoceros have all their places to fill 

 in our world picture. They are amazingly interesting, and there- 

 fore their destruction should only be carried out to the degree of 

 keeping them in their proper sphere." 



The whole situation is thoroughly sized up by H. G. Wells in 

 his Outline of History, as follows : 



"But there will be no diminution of adventure or romance in 

 this world of the days to come. Sea fisheries and the incessant in- 

 surrection of the sea, for example, will call for their own stalwart 

 types of men; the high air will clamour for manhood, the deep and 

 dangerous secret places of nature. Men will turn again with renewed 

 interest to the animal world. In these disordered days a stupid, 

 uncontrolled massacre of animal species goes on — from certain 

 angles of vision it is a thing almost more tragic than human miseries ; 

 in the nineteenth century dozens of animal species, and some of them 

 very interesting species, were exterminated ; but one of the first 

 fruits of an effective world state would be the better protection of 

 what are now wild beasts. It is a strange thing in human history 

 to note how little has been done since the Bronze Age in taming, 

 using, befriending, and appreciating the animal life about us. But 

 that mere witless killing which is called sport today, would inevitably 

 give place in a better educated world community to a modification 

 of the primitive instincts that find expression in this way, changing 

 them into an interest not in the deaths, but in the lives of the beasts, 

 and leading to fresh and perhaps very strange and beautiful at- 

 tempts to befriend these pathetic, kindred lower creatures we no 

 longer fear as enemies, hate as rivals, or need as slaves. And a 

 world state and universal justice does not mean the imprisonment of 



