Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/231

Rh civilising influences, natural instincts survive? Your infant recapitulates the crude impulses of his long forgotten ancestors. "Surely they dwell," as Stevenson so aptly puts it in his entertaining but philosophical article on "Child's Play," "in a mythological epoch and are not the contemporaries of their parents."

The humane sportsman, if asked for arguments in favour of his pastime, will tell us that exercise in the open air, the necessary sharpening of the wits, and the pitting of knowledge and power against the inborn wariness of wild creatures, is health-giving and exhilarating. If he stops there he is right; if he adds, as some will, elevating, we demur. Familiarity with death, even of the meanest creatures, is apt to dull the sensibilities; after that it is an easy step to thoughtless cruelty, and thence to pleasure in giving pain. Blood lust, unfortunately, is no unknown disease.

Twenty years ago I stated that whilst deploring the massacre of wild animals I believed that were sports of the chase to lose all hold upon our countrymen, Britons would also lose much of the energy and grit by which the Empire was upbuilt. We have learnt hard practical lessons since then, and we wonder it much of this grit and energy was misplaced. How we might have colonised may be learnt from the early history of Pennsylvania, where there was no lack of true grit and energy, tempered by wise statesmanship. What we should never forget is the story of Tasmania, and our hands were not always clean in India, South Africa, and in many of those glorious victories which our history books paint in such glowing colours.

This, however, does not alter the fact that the real sportsman must be a man of untiring zeal and energy, a man of muscle and yet of brain. All outdoor sports, unless indulged in to excess, are health-giving; those savage