and death more than the simpler races of men, who, in their turn, feel
it more than lower animals. A wild animal that has just escaped death
will resume its occupation as if nothing had happened. The sportsman's
clean kill is only an incident in the day's work, not anxiously
apprehended like an operation or a battle. But pain and death are very
real, all the same. So death should be inflicted as quickly as
possible, even at the risk of losing the rest of one's bag. And, even
beyond the reach of any laws, no animal should ever be killed in sport
when its own death might entail the lingering death of its young. A
sportsman who observes these rules instinctively, and who never kills
what he cannot get and use, is not a cruel man. He certainly is a
beast of prey. But so is the most delicate invalid woman when drinking
a cup of beef tea. Sport has its use in the development of health and
skill and courage. Its practice is one of life's eternal compromises.
And the best thing we can do for it now is to make it clean. We have
far too much of the other kind. The essential difference has never
been more shrewdly put than in the caustic epigram, that there is the
same difference between a sportsman and a "sport" as there is between
a gentleman and a "gent." I believe that the enforcement of laws and
the establishment of sanctuaries will raise our sport to a higher
plane, reduce the suffering now inflicted when killing for business,
and help in every way towards the conversion of the human into the
humane. Besides, paradoxical as it may seem to some good people, the
true sportsman has always proved to be one of the very best conservers
of all wild life worth keeping. So there is a distinctly desirable
benefit to be expected in this direction, as in every other.

Finally, I return to my zoophilists, a vast but formless class of
people, both in and outside of the other classes mentioned, and one
which includes every man, woman and child with any fondness for wild