change also. When game was plentiful, I believed that it was right for
men and boys to kill a limited amount of it for sport and for the table.
But the old basis has been swept away by an Army of Destruction that now
is almost beyond all control. We must awake, and arouse to the new
situation, face it like men, and adjust our minds to the new conditions.
The three million gunners of to-day must no longer expect or demand the
same generous hunting privileges that were right for hunters fifty years
ago, when game was fifty times as plentiful as it is now and there was
only one killer for every fifty now in the field.

The fatalistic idea that bag-limit laws can save the game is to-day _the
curse of all our game birds, mammals and fishes!_ It is a fraud, a
delusion and a snare. That miserable fetish has been worshipped much too
long. Our game is being exterminated, everywhere, by blind insistence
upon "open seasons," and solemn reliance upon "legal bag-limits." If a
majority of the people of America feel that so long as there is any game
alive there must be an annual two months or four months open season for
its slaughter, then assuredly we soon will have a gameless continent.

The only thing that will save the game is by stopping the killing of it!
In establishing and promulgating this principle, the cause of wild-life
protection greatly needs three things: money, labor, and publicity. With
the first, we can secure the second and third. But can we get it,--and
_get it in time to save?_

This volume is in every sense a contribution to a Cause; and as such it
ever will remain. I wish the public to receive it on that basis. So much
important material has drifted straight to it from other hands that this
unexpected aid seems to the author like a good omen.