same, I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not vote it a tame
substitute. Without something being killed, the zest, the 'snap,' is
gone. It is as depressing as a sham fight."

"Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what a part it has played in
human history! Even religion countenances it, and war glorifies it. Men
are never in higher spirits than when they are going to kill, or be
killed themselves, or see something else killed. Tennyson's 'ape and
tiger' die very hard in the tamest of us."

"Alas, indeed they do!" said my friend with a sigh. "But I do believe
that they are dying none the less. Just of late there has been a
reaction in favour of brute force, and people like you and me have been
ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimentalists. But reaction is one of the
laws of advance. Human progress always takes a step backwards after it
has taken two forward. And so it must be here too. In the end, it is the
highest type among men and nations that count, and the highest types
among both today are those which show most humanity, shrink most from
the infliction of pain. When one thinks of the horrible cruelties that
were the legal punishment of criminals, even within the last two hundred
years, and not merely brutal criminals, but also political offenders or
so-called heretics--how every one thought it the natural and proper
thing to break a man on the wheel for a difference of opinion, or
torture him with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of mind, and
how the pettiest larcenies were punished by death; it seems as if we
of today, even the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the same
race--and it is impossible to deny that the heart of the world has grown
softer and that pity is becoming more and more a natural instinct in
human nature. I believe that some day it will have thrust out cruelty
altogether, and that the voluntary infliction of pain upon another will