Forest and Stream 
A W 
eekly Journal of the i\.od and 
Copyright, 1902, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
R 
Gun. 
Terms, $4 A Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. ( 
Six Months, $2. j 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, 1902 
j VOL. LVIII.— No. 3. 
I No. 340 Broadway, New York. 
THE PROPOSED MAINE LICENSE. 
Good reasons may exist for the imposition of a tax on 
the non-resident sportsmen in Maine, but they are not dis- 
closed in the argument made by the chief advocate of 
the plan at the meeting of the Maine Sportsmen's Asso- 
ciation in Bangor last week. The thread of reasoning in 
Commissioner Carleton's rambling address is somewhat 
difficult to follow; there is no presentation of the subject 
leading to the logical conclusion that a non-resident 
license would be advantageous ; but the grounds upon 
which he urges the imposition of such a license appear to 
be these: 
First. That the people who come into Maine for their 
vacation yield in the course of a year a revenue of $15,- 
000,000; that this prodigious revenue cannot be main- 
tained unless the game shall be better protected; that the 
Legislature will not make an adequate appropriation, and 
that the only way then to raise the money is to tax the 
visiting sportsmen. 
Second. That the non-resident license system is in 
force in numerous other States, therefore it should be 
adopted by Maine. 
Third. That there is a large amount of illegal game 
killing, and that a license system would provide a warden 
force to suppress it. 
Fourth.' That numerous sportsmen now come into the 
State bringing their own supplies, and paying nothing out 
to the Maine people. A license tax would extract at least 
the amount of the license from these visitors for the 
benefit of Maine citizens. 
Fifth. That there are certain non-resident sportsmen 
who would like to see a license system enforced because 
it would decrease the number of visiting hunters and 
there would be more game left for those who did pay the 
license. 
These are the salient points of the argument, which is 
printed in another column ; but the chief note of it all is 
money — we want money, we must have money, the visit- 
ing sportsmen have money and must be made to disgorge 
money for us. 
As to the first argument, we have already pointed out 
that if visiting sportsmen and tourists leave $15,000,000 
in Maine in a season, the State can well afford to do its 
own game protection* without bleeding the visitors. Mr. 
Oak put the case in a nutshell when he said : 
If we must have it, let us take honest means to obtain it, and not 
throttle the innocent sportsman and order him to "stand and de- 
liver." Allow me to suggest a course that is legitimate. Let those 
so zealous for the proposed law, furnish the proofs of their asser- 
tion that $15,000,000 is spent here annually by tourists and "sports- 
men, and the % same Legislature that has heretofore appropriated 
$25,000 a year for the department, on the strength of the statement, 
accompanied by proofs, that four to five million dollars, are spent 
here annually, will appropriate double or triple that amount. 
The men composing our legislative bodies are inclined to be 
reasonable and fair in all matters, and sufficiently wise to realize 
that - a $75,000 annual expense to maintain a $15,000,000 annual in- 
come is a mere bagatelle. 
Even if this estimate of $15,000,000 be an exaggeration 
by Mr*. Carleton. in order to magnify the importance of 
his office, and if we throw off say $10,000,000 and call the 
revenue $5,000,000, still under these circumstances it would 
be business policy for the Legislature of Maine to appro- 
priate all the funds necessary to secure the most perfect 
attainable protection of the game. It would be money 
well invested. 
Mr. Carleton makes much of the fact that the non- 
resident license system is in force in many other States, 
citing among them Arkansas, Missouri, Delaware and the 
Canadian Provinces; but as to these, either he himself 
has no clear understanding of their bearing on the Maine 
question, or else he designs by making an impressive 
catalogue to gain support for his contention by the sheer 
weight of the list. Of what conceivable value as a guide 
to Maine can be the example of Arkansas, for instance, 
whose non-resident license provision is directed against 
professional hunters who follow hunting as an avocation, 
and is in effect employed chiefly for purposes of black- 
mail by various county authorities ? The Maine non-ex- 
port law now covers the market-hunting phase. Or the 
Mi ssouri law. which absolutely forbids hunting by non- 
residents? How does that serve as a guide to Maine, 
whose desire is to attract sportsmen? Or the Delaware 
law, which is not a game protective measure, but a 
relic of the petty sectionalism of old times ? Or fhe 
Canadian Provincial laws, whiqh set up barriers against 
Americans as aliens? Is Maine so close |o Canada' that 
its citizens are emulous of being ranked as Canadians 
when it comes to treating citizens of the United States as 
foreigners? 
In support of his argument that the licenses should be 
imposed to provide a warden force to suppress the large 
amount of illegal killing, Mr. Carleton avers than in 1901 
the number of deer illegally killed was very large, "many 
estimate them among the thousands," and that there were 
ninety-six moose illegally killed. To end this carnival of 
lawlessness, the Commissioner would tax all visiting 
sportsmen to provide funds for more wardens. If the 
unlawful killing of deer and moose is as free as he has 
pictured, and there reigns in the Maine woods such im- 
.munity as to encourage the poachers to this extent, it is 
manifest that the urgent demands of the hour is not for a 
non-resident license tax, but for a reorganization of the 
Fish and Game Commission. 
A special grievance for which Commissioner Carleton 
thinks the license would be a remedy is the coming into 
the State of sportsmen — Western .sportsmen in particular 
— who bring into Maine their own supplies, including 
"potatoes and baked bread, and who leave scarcely a dol- 
lar among our people. Are we any losers thereby?" he 
plaintively asks, and then adds, "If a small license fee- 
say of $20 — would keep them away, then in Heaven's name 
let us have a license fee." 
Now that is a sentiment of which a public official of 
any State in the Union might well be ashamed. How long 
since has it become a crime for the sportsman to outfit at 
home and pack his provisions into those distant parts 
which he has chosen for his hunting country? Have the 
people of Maine become so greedy and avaricious and 
clutching and grasping that with an income of $15,000,000 
in a year from the visiting sportsmen they begrudge this 
party the paltry price of a few potatoes eaten in camp ? 
We do not believe it. We do not believe that Commis- 
sioner Carleton truly represents Maine people when he 
makes them out to be so niggardly as all this. "Are we 
any losers thereby?" Yes, the people of Maine unques- 
tionably did lose the price of the potatoes, but we trust 
they have not yet altogether become so mercenary toward 
sportsmen as to have lost what is worth more than the 
price of a few potatoes, the spirit of welcome to their 
grand old woods, a welcome even to the sportsman who 
has to economize and plan and contrive to make the 
ends meet. 
Now there are very many such sportsmen. Visitors to 
the Maine woods are not all of the Ziegler type, who can 
fit out a caravan and retain a retinue of guides, and by 
lavish expenditures buy them and own them body and 
soul, and all the game in sight along with them. There 
is, of .cour.se, a multitude of sportsmen who are of the 
class cited by Mr. Carleton as willing to pay a license fee 
to make. Maine hunting more exclusive; and such men 
would willingly have a good stiff tax imposed that would 
keep at home the great majority of deer and moose 
hunters. But this is not the class whose wishes and 
tendencies should dominate official actions; nor are they 
the ones whose influence should prevail with a game com- 
mission. The time may come in this country when hunt- 
ing will be exclusively the expensive privilege of the 
rich, but we ought all of us to trust and to labor that that 
day may be yet far distant; and the endeavor and aim of 
those who are charged with the administration of game 
protection should be to postpone such a time as far as 
possible and not to hasten it. 
To the multitude of workers who make up the great 
mass of society, a vacation is an actual necessity ; and of 
all vacations the one spent in the woods is the most re- 
freshing and upbuilding. The expenses involved in an 
outing are at the best considerable, and it often means a 
deal of planning and contriving to provide them. The 
actual effect of Commissioner Carleton's "small license 
fee — say $20." would in innumerable cases put the project 
of a trip to the Maine woods out of the question. The 
system might yield the money which the Commissioner 
appears to think justifies the end, but it certainly would 
be a great hardship on the very people who stand most in 
need of a breath of the Maine woods. 
THE POINT OF VIEW. 
Nothing shows more clearly how entirely modern views 
of sport are founded on sentiment and custom than the 
widely differing ideas held about it in different parts of 
the world. Even the signification of the word is unfixed. 
Originally it seems to have meant to take pleasure in 
some active way. In America in the early days of the 
last century a sportsman was a professional gambler. 
Then a competition of some kind, especially one on which 
money was staked. Even to-day the New York tough 
speaking of himself as a "dead game sport," means that 
he gets drunk, gambles, is ready — if necessary from his 
point of view— to commit murder. People who bet on 
horse races, play poker and sometimes drink to excess, are 
apt rather proudly to call themselves "sporty." 
But in these modern days sport, sportsman and sports- 
manship have a somewhat different meaning from any of 
these, and refer chiefly to outdoor recreations, such as 
shooting, fishing, yachting, mountain climbing and canoe- 
ing, conducted in the best and most approved fashion, and 
after methods which call forth the more manly and 
higher qualities of the men and women who indulge in 
them. 
With the primitive man, sport, as we use the term, did 
not exist. He killed game or fish in order to support 
life. The killing was his business, not his pleasure. It 
was work, not play. If he journeyed from one point to 
another, he wished to cover the ground between them 
as speedily as possible. Sport is an outgrowth of civiliza- 
tion—even of modern civilization — though the lust for 
blood, and the killing merely for the sake of killing, has 
always existed and still exists. 
In this country the sports of the field at first were 
practiced chiefly in the Southern States, partly because the 
settlers there were more pleasure loving than the stern 
Puritans who settled in New England, and partly because 
the mild climate during the season when agricultural 
pursuits could not be carried on fostered the indulgence 
in shooting, fox hunting and fishing. 
On the Continent, in Britain and in the United States, 
how different the definitions of this word. The Belgian 
or the Frenchman shoots larks, and other little birds, and 
proudly terms this "le sport"; the British wildfowler 
shoots at night, and in wild weather sculls his punt up 
close to the raft of sleeping ducks, and then turns loose 
his cannon on them and proudly gathers the slain and 
shoots over such cripples as he can find; the New Eng- 
land fox hunter, lying in wait behind a stone wall or in a 
fence corner, shoots with a shotgun the fox which plays 
before his hounds; the Southern sportsman in headlong 
pursuit follows on horseback the pack that presses closely 
on Reynard's heels. Are all these forms of recreation 
sport? Is any one of them? This must largely be a 
matter of custom, education, opinion. The Briton sneers 
as he speaks of the Frenchman's game; the American 
thinks the British punt shooter a murderer ; contempt too 
deep for words is felt by the Southern fox hunter for him 
of the North. 
The North American Fish and Game Protective Asso- 
ciation will convene in Burlington, Vt, on Wednesday 
of next week, Jan. 22, and the Vermont Fish and Game 
League will attend the Association banquet on Thursday 
evening. 
A LONG ISLAND DEER PARK. 
Senator McKinney has introduced in the Senate of the 
New York Legislature a measure to put into effect a plan 
originally proposed in these columns, the establishment 
of a State game preserve on Long Island. The bill 
provides that the Forest, Fish and Game Commission 
shall acquire for the State a tract of not less than 5,000 
acres in the territory embraced in the towns of Islip, 
Smithtown, Brookhaven, Riverhead and Southampton, and 
shall establish this as a State park for the preservation of 
the forests and the protection and breeding of deer and 
wild game. 
This plan, if put into effect, will provide a refuge for 
the Long Island deer, and will secure the grateful reten- 
tion of a bit of wild life near New York. Mr. McKinney 
should have cordial support. The park is an actual neces- 
sity if we are to have any of the wild conditions of Long 
Island preserved. Once secure in this refuge, the deer 
supply will multiply at such a rate as to afford material 
for stocking the hunting grounds of the State, ?md for 
this reason the text of the bill which provides that "such 
park shall forever be reserved and maintained for the 
free use of all the people," and no game shaj} be taken 
therein," might wisely be so amended as to permit the 
taking of live game by the Game Commission for removal 
to the other forest preserves belonging. to the State, ' ' 
