unting to a
kind of consecration. A man of this stamp once told me that no emotion
in his life had ever equalled that of his first woodcock.

You cannot have such open-air life, such clean and poetic emotion
without killing. Men are men; they will not get up at cock-crow for
the sake of a mere walk, or sleep in the woods for the sake of the
wood's noises: they must have an object; and what object is there
except killing beasts or birds or fish? Men have to be sportsmen
because they can't all be either naturalists or poets. Killing animals
(and, some persons would add, killing other men) is necessary to keep
man manly. And where men are no longer manly they become cruel, not
for the sake of sport or war, but for their lusts and for cruelty's
own sake. And that seems to settle the question.

XIV.

But the question is not really settled. It is merely settled for the
present, but not for the future. It is surely a sign of our weakness
and barbarism that we cannot imagine to-morrow as better than to-day,
and that, for all our vaunted temporal progress and hypocritical talk
of duty, we are yet unable to think and to feel in terms of
improvement and change; but let our habits, like the vilest vested
interests, oppose a veto to the hope and wish for better things.

To realise that _what is_ does not mean what _will be_, constitutes,
methinks, the real spirituality of us poor human creatures, allowing
our judgments and aspirations to pass beyond our short and hidebound
life, to live on in the future, and help to make that _yonside of our
mortality_, which some of us attempt to satisfy with theosophic
reincarnation and planchette messages!

But such spirituality, whose "it shall"--or "it shall not"--will
become an ever larger part of all _it is_, depends upon the courage of
recognising that much of what the past forces us to accept is not good
enough for the future; recognising that, odious as this may seem to
our self-conceit and sloth, many of the things we do and like and are,
will not bear even our own uncritical scrutiny. Above all, that the
lesser evil which we prefer to the greater is an evil for all that,
and requires riddance.

Much of the world's big mischief is due to the avoidance of a bigger
one. For instance, all this naively insisted on masculine inability to
obtain the poet's or naturalist's joys without shooting a bird or
hooking a fish, this inability to love wild life, early hours and
wholesome fatigu