are exterminating our finest species of mammals, birds and fishes
_according to law!_

I am appalled by the mass of evidence proving that throughout the entire
United States and Canada, in every state and province, the existing
legal system for the preservation of wild life is fatally defective.
There is not a single state in our country from which the killable game
is not being rapidly and persistently shot to death, legally or
illegally, very much more rapidly than it is breeding, with
extermination for the most of it close in sight. This statement is not
open to argument; for millions of men know that it is literally true. We
are living in a fool's paradise.

The rage for wild-life slaughter is far more prevalent to-day throughout
the world than it was in 1872, when the buffalo butchers paved the
prairies of Texas and Colorado with festering carcasses. From one end of
our continent to the other, there is a restless, resistless desire to
"kill, _kill!_"

I have been shocked by the accumulation of evidence showing that all
over our country and Canada fully nine-tenths of our protective laws
have practically been dictated by the killers of the game, and that in
all save a very few instances the hunters have been exceedingly careful
to provide "open seasons" for slaughter, as long as any game remains to
kill!

_And yet, the game of North America does not belong wholly and
exclusively to the men who kill! The other ninety-seven per cent of the
People have vested rights in it, far exceeding those of the three per
cent. Posterity has claims upon it that no honest man can ignore._