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be advised to begin with the axe at the root. In the attempt to pro- 
tect our game birds we have been clipping away at the little twigs 
too long. Let us now take up the axe. The laws which have been 
passed regulating the sale and transportation of game are useful 
under present conditions, but there is one statutory provision alone 
which will strike at the root of the evil and check the slaughter of 
game birds by taking away the incentive for pot hunting, and that 
is to prohibit the sale of all game birds. 
It would be for the interest of the marketman were this enacted, 
for he is now constantly hampered by restrictions and harassed by 
legal requirements. It would not, in the end, injure his business, 
for he would then sell turkeys, chickens, geese, ducks, pigeons, squabs, 
guineas and possibly pheasants in place of the game he now sells. 
Such a law would be better for the farmer and poultry raiser, who 
would be called upon to supply more domesticated birds to take the 
place of the wild ones now sold. It would be better for the sportsman, 
who sees himself prohibited from shooting certain wild fowl and other 
migrating game birds here in certain months only to have them shot 
by market gunners in other States and sold in our own as well as other 
markets. Such a law would injure no one except the man who pur- 
sues birds for a living, the man who kills the goose that lays the golden 
egg, the man who exterminates the birds. The time is gone by in 
Massachusetts and in the east when any man should be allowed to 
live by the killing of birds and game. This killing birds for gold 
should be stopped for the benefit of the whole people. We should 
no longer be allowed to exterminate, and thus deprive posterity of its 
birth-right in the birds and game. 
The market hunter or pot hunter is often a good and worthy citizen, 
but his day is past and he must adopt some other calling. More 
than forty States now prohibit the sale of all or a part of their game. 
Massachusetts should have been among the leaders in this move- 
ment. 
Next in importance to the elimination of the market hunter comes 
the bag limit. Some so-called sportsmen are nearly as destructive 
as the market hunter, but many who now kill so long as their am- 
munition lasts would respect a legal limit to the number of birds to 
be killed in a day or in a season. 
RicuHt oF SEARCH. 
The Commissioners on Fisheries and Game and their deputies 
should be given the power of search without a warrant. This power 
can be exercised without abuse as it now is in other States. There 
can be little hope of thorough enforcement of the law until the officers 
who enforce it have this power. 
THE SANCTUARY. 
Where all other measures promise only failure there is still one 
resource left, and that is the setting aside of tracts or reservations 
of woodland, lake, river or shore within the limits of which all killing 
of birds by man may be prohibited, under heavy penalties. In such 
tracts or reservations the resident game and birds can breed unmolested, 
and can replenish the surrounding country. Here migrants can find 
safety to stop and rest from their long journeys. 
A chain of such sanctuaries established along the Atlantic coast of 
North America would probably preserve our stock of wild fowl and 
