Page:Henry Stephens Salt - A Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays.pdf/101

 for the butcher’s trade is not “sport ;” they are the glorious possession of those unselfish individuals who devote a lifetime to hunting, shooting, and ﬁshing. I have several times heard this plea gravely advanced as a justification of ﬁeld sports, so it may be worth while to point out (with apologies to my readers for an apparent insult to their reasoning abilities) that it is not much credit to a sportsman, who systematically commits the cruelty of taking away harmless lives for his own idle recreation, to be able to urge in self-defence that he does not needlessly torture his victims. Possibly not ; but what then ? At best, this limitation shows that a sportsman is not quite such a ruffian as he might be. It is difficult to be serious in refuting such arrant and disingenuous nonsense, so I will conclude with a short quotation from one of De Quincey’s best known books, his essay on “Murder, considered as one of the Fine Arts” In this essay he humorously treats of murder—much as the sportsman affects to regard sport—as an honourable profession, giving scope to the highest art and dexterity of handiwork, and ennobling the character of those who practise it. I recommend the careful