en proved that
any permanent injury to the brain results from it. In any case the
brain, as English society is at present constituted, can hardly be
considered a vital organ.

This, to the best of my knowledge, is the technical history of the
modern revival of pugilism. It is only one more example of the fact that
legislators, like other people, must learn their business by their own
mistakes, and that the first attempts to suppress an evil by law
generally intensify it. Prizefighting, though often connived at, was
never legal. Even in its palmiest days prizefights were banished from
certain counties by hostile magistrates, just as they have been driven
from the United States and England to Belgium on certain occasions in
our own time. But as the exercise of sparring, conducted by a couple of
gentlemen with boxing gloves on, was regarded as part of a manly
physical education, a convention grew up by which it became practically
legal to make a citizen's nose bleed by a punch from the gloved fist,
and illegal to do the same thing with the naked knuckles. A code of
glove-fighting rules was drawn up by a prominent patron of pugilism; and
this code was practically legalized by the fact that even when a death
resulted from a contest under these rules the accessaries were not
punished. No question was raised as to whether the principals were paid
to fight for the amusement of the spectators, or whether a prize for the
winner was provided in stakes, share of the gate, or a belt with the
title of champion. These, the true criteria of prizefighting, were
ignored; and the sole issue raised was whether the famous dictum of Dr.
Watts, "Your little hands were never made, etc.," had been duly
considered by providing the said little hands with a larger hitting
surface, a longer range, and four ounces extra weight.

In short, then, what has happened has been the virtual legalization of
prizefighting under cover of the boxing glove. And this is exactly what
public opinion desires. We do not like fighting; but we like looking on
at fights: therefore we require a law which will punish the prizefighter
if he hits us, and secure us the protection of the police whilst we sit
in a comfortable hall and watch him hitting another prizefighter. And
that is just the law we have got at present.

Thus Cashel Byron's plea for a share of the legal toleration accorded to
the vivisector has been virtually granted since he made it. The
legalization of