Jan., 1913 
EDITORIAL NOTES AND NEWS 
45 
The California Associated Societies for the 
Conservation of Wild Life, of which the 
Cooper Club is a member, has practically con- 
centrated its attention on the proposed bill 
prohibiting the sale of game. The measure as 
drawn up is in ideally good hands. Senator 
William R. Flint, popular, influential and able, 
has already introduced the bill. 
Communications and editorials from all 
over the State and the United States are be- 
ing received demanding that the sale of 
game be prohibited. A book by Dr. Wm. T. 
Hornaday, Director of the New York Zoologi- 
cal Park, just issued, says California’s game 
is doomed unless a non-sale law is passed 
at once. 
The National Association of Audubon 
Societies, the New York Zoological Society, 
and the Campfire Club of America are urg- 
ing California to join the distinguished roll 
of eighteen states that have entirely prohibited 
the sale of game. 
Now! Every reader of The Condor, and 
especially every Cooper Club member, who 
believes in the justice of this cause, can ren- 
der effective help by writing immediately to 
his Assemblyman and Senator as well as to 
Hon. George J. Hans, Chairman Senate Com- 
mittee on Fish and Game, and Hon. John H. 
Guill, Chairman Assembly Committee on Fisn 
and Game, requesting their support for the 
Flint bill, prohibiting the sale of game. Write 
also to Senator Flint, assuring him of youi 
hearty support. 
The following extract from an editorial in 
the Fresno Repubeican makes short work of 
the absurd claim that the man who does not 
hunt is deprived of a natural right if he can- 
not buy game to eat. The great mass of 
people hunt for sport ; only the hotelman and 
the market gunner hunt for private pockets 
in order that lazy Croesus may “buy a duck 
when he wants it !” 
“They will simply have to go without it for 
awhile,” was the reply made at a hearing in 
Sacramento to the query what the people who 
do not shoot will do for game, pending the 
development of its commercial production for 
sale. And the Examiner takes this as a con- 
fession of the absurdity, and injustice of the 
whole scheme of reserving wild game from 
tame commerce. 
But why not? Are the only privileges to be 
those of money? Are we so commercialized 
that the normal way of getting ever3rthing 
must be to buy it? There are plenty of thing.s 
— diamonds and champagne and automobiles, 
for instance — that most people must go with- 
out. Those who can afford these things see 
no injustice in the exclusion of those who 
cannot. The exclusion is commercial, and 
therefore, to the commercial-minded, it is con- 
clusive. But when any other standard of dis- 
tinction is suggested, by which they would 
be the excluded ones, then they grow right- 
eously indignant. Yet once it was quite axio- 
matic that all good things belonged to the 
strong as it now is that they belong to the 
rich. The mighty hunter had the game, the 
mighty warrior the government and the 
mighty miser his gold heaps — unless the war- 
rior and the hunter took them away from 
him. The mighty thinker, then as now, had 
no privilege but the hope of posterity’s recog- 
nition. But now the mighty miser demands 
the first fruits of all the others, and sets him- 
self up as the only privileged class. That the 
game should be the privilege of the hunter 
strikes him as an invasion of his own rignt 
to monopolize all privileges to himself. 
Yet already most of the best things of life 
are attainable only by other processes than 
purchase. The best part, even of the game, is 
not the eating, but the hunting of it. Pam- 
pered Croesus, at Delmonico’s may eat his 
canvasback, and carp because it was on the fire 
nineteen minutes instead of eighteen. But who 
shall buy the sunrise, the tang of the morning 
air, the mists on the salt marshes, the spell of 
the hunting and the triumph of the successful 
shot? Ten thousand generations of hunting 
ancestry bequeathed us the instinct whose sat- 
isfaction is the huntsman’s joy. But it is a 
thing to be achieved by stout legs, clear eyes 
and steady nerve, and is for sale to no fat 
purse except for personal exertion also. Is it 
imperative that the mere incidental gastro- 
nomic product of that uncommercial activity 
shall be open to commercial access? 
The two finest mountain views on the 
American continent are doubtless those from 
the summits of Mt. Whitney and Mt. Dana. 
They are open to any man with strong legs 
and sound lungs, and the price of beans and 
bacon, but a million dollars will not carry a 
man to them in a Pullman car. The love of 
a good woman is one man’s freely, for his 
own devotion in return, but it is no man’s for 
pay. Money will buy books and pictures and 
music, but not the knowledge to appreciate 
them. And the touch with wild things, and 
the hereditary lure of the wild man’s chase 
for them — these are something better than 
buying and selling. If, to preserve the wild 
poesies and to keep alive the untamed pur- 
suit of them, it becomes necessary to separate 
the products of the hunt from organised com- 
merce, until commerce itself can produce what 
it consumes, there is no injury done except to 
the fiction that all things are the natural right 
of him zvho is able to pay for them. — W. P. T. 
REPORT OF PROGRESS IN CONSER- 
VATION 
To contingent organizations making up the 
