SPORTSMEN AND BIRDS. 
479 
animal in the last stage of decrepitude, old age and 
uselessness, is brought into a slaughter-house, called an 
“ arena,” to be there treated in the most barbarous and 
shameless manner, to be whipped and spurred by human 
beings, gored by a bull, and subjected to barbarities 
too sickening to mention. What, I ask, can be expected 
from such a specimen of the human race ? One cannot 
look to him for pity towards the birds and beasts of 
the chase. Such a man is still a slave, scarcely freed 
from that curse of the human race,—dark, ignorant 
priestcraft, which is welded into his very soul: still the 
victim of ignorance, barbarity, and priestly tyranny, he 
remains a slave, and, slave-like, is ever cruel if he gets 
the upper hand. 
At the bottom, the Spaniard’s nature is great and 
noble, but he will never act in accordance with his 
better self before he becomes a free man. At the present 
moment he is not so, and therefore he bullies every 
living creature. His hunting, even, is a species of 
tormenting, which looks with contempt on any law or 
regulation of time or consideration. Thus it is that 
birds in Spain flee the presence of man, as though he 
were their greatest enemy. It cuts the lover of birds to 
the heart’s core to see the Nightingale, in the midst of 
the season of song and love, appear amongst the many 
birds hanging up in the market for food ,—to see tiny 
warblers shot down merely for the sake of killing them ! 
We will, however, draw a veil over these miserable 
pictures, and congratulate ourselves rather on the 
sportsmen of our own land and their German chase ! 
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