on it that no honest man can ignore._

I am now going to ask both the true sportsman and the people who do not
kill wild things to awake, and do their plain duty in protecting and
preserving the game and other wild life which belongs partly to us, but
chiefly to those who come after us. Can they be aroused, before it is
too late?

The time to discuss tiresome academic theories regarding "bag limits"
and different "open seasons" as being sufficient to preserve the game,
has gone by! We have reached the point where the alternatives are _long
closed seasons or a gameless continent;_ and we must choose one or the
other, speedily. A continent without wild life is like a forest with no
leaves on the trees.

The great increase in the slaughter of song birds for food, by the
negroes and poor whites of the South, has become an unbearable scourge
to our migratory birds,--the very birds on which farmers north and south
depend for protection from the insect hordes,--the very birds that are
most near and dear to the people of the North. _Song-bird slaughter is
growing and spreading_, with the decrease of the game birds! It is a
matter that requires instant attention and stern repression. At the
present moment it seems that the only remedy lies in federal protection
for all migratory birds,--because so many states will not do their duty.

We are weary of witnessing the greed, selfishness and cruelty of
"civilized" man toward the wild creatures of the earth. We are sick of
tales of slaughter and pictures of carnage. It is time for a sweeping
Reformation; and that is precisely what we now demand.

I have been a sportsman myself; but times have changed, and we must
change also. When game was plentiful, I believed that it was right for
men and boys to kill a limited amount of it for sport and for the table.
But the old basis has been swept away by an Army of Destruction that now
is almost beyond all control. We must awake, and arouse to the new
situation, face it like men, and adjust our minds to the new conditions.
The three million gunners of to-day must no longer expect or demand the
same generous hunting privileges that were right for hunters fifty years
ago, when game was fifty times as plentiful as it is now and there was
only one killer for every fifty now in the field.

The fatalistic idea that bag-limit laws can save the game is to-day _the
curse of all our game birds, mammals and fishes!_ It is a fraud, a
delusion and a s