nal law to
permit year after year the wholesale slaughter of birds of passage of
species that no civilized man has a right to kill.

There are some tales of slaughter from which every properly-balanced
Christian mind is bound to recoil with horror. One such tale has
recently been given to us in the pages of the _Avicultural Magazine_, of
London, for January, 1912, by Mr. Hubert D. Astley, F.Z.S., whose word
no man will dispute. In condensing it, let us call it

* * * * *

THE ITALIAN SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

This story does not concern game birds of any kind. Quite the contrary.
That it should be published in America, a land now rapidly filling up
with Italians, is a painful necessity in order that the people of
America may be enabled accurately to measure the fatherland traditions
and the fixed mental attitude of Italians generally toward our song
birds. I shall now hold a mirror up to Italian nature. If the image is
either hideous or grotesque, the fault will not be mine. I specially
commend the picture to the notice of American game wardens and judges on
the bench.

The American reader must be reminded that the Italian peninsula reaches
out a long arm of land into the Mediterranean Sea for several hundred
miles toward the sunny Barbary coast of North Africa. This great
southward highway has been chosen by the birds of central Europe as
their favorite migration route. Especially is this true of the small
song-birds with weak wings and a minimum of power for long-sustained
flight. Naturally, they follow the peninsula down to the Italian Land's
End before they launch forth to dare the passage of the Mediterranean.

[Illustration: AN ITALIAN ROCCOLO, ON LAKE COMO
A Death-Trap for Song-Birds. From the Avicultural Magazine]

Italy is the narrow end of a great continental funnel, into the wide
northern end of which Germany, Austria, France and Switzerland annually
pour their volume of migratory bird life. And what is the result? For
answer let us take the testimony of two reliable witnesses, and file it
for use on the day when Tony Macchewin, gun in hand and pockets bulging
with cartridges, goes afield in our country and opens fire on our birds.

The linnet is one of the sweet singers of Europe. It is a small,
delicately formed, weak-winged little bird, about the size of our
phoebe-bird. It weighs only a trifle more than a girl's love-letter.
Where it breeds and rears its young