not connected with any of the material interests
concerned. I do not even belong to a Fish and Game club. My only
object is to prove, from verifiable facts, that animal life in
Labrador is being recklessly and wantonly squandered, that this is
detrimental to everyone except the get-rich-quickly people who are
ready to destroy any natural resources forever in order to reap an
immediate and selfish advantage, that sanctuaries will better
conditions in every way, and that the ultimate benefit to Canada--both
in a material and a higher sense--will repay the small present expense
required, over and over again. And this repayment need not be long
deferred. I can show that once the public grasps the issues at stake
it will supply enough petitioners to move any government based on
popular support, and that the scheme itself will supply enough money
to make the sanctuaries a national asset of the most paying kind, and
enough higher human interest to make them priceless as a possession
for ourselves and a heritage for all who come after.

If, Sir, you would allow me to make one more preliminary explanation,
I should like to say that I have purposely left out all the usual
array of statistics. I have, of course, examined them carefully
myself, and based my arguments upon them. But I have excluded them
from my text because they would have made an already long paper unduly
longer, and because they are perfectly accessible to every member of
the Commission which I have the honour of addressing to-night.

SANCTUARIES.

A sanctuary may be defined as a place where Man is passive and the
rest of Nature active. Till quite recently Nature had her own
sanctuaries, where man either did not go at all or only as a
tool-using animal in comparatively small numbers. But now, in this
machinery age, there is no place left where man cannot go with
overwhelming forces at his command. He can strangle to death all the
nobler wild life in the world to-day. To-morrow he certainly will have
done so, unless he exercises due foresight and self-control in the
mean time. There is not the slightest doubt that birds and mammals are
now being killed off much faster than they can breed. And it is always
the largest and noblest forms of life that suffer most. The whales and
elephants, lions and eagles, go. The rats and flies, and all mean
parasites, remain. This is inevitable in certain cases. But it is
wanton killing off that I am speaking of to-night. Civil