We recall an incident related some years ago at a Humanitarian League meeting, where the craze for “big-game” shooting was being discussed. Everyone knows how the possessors of such “trophies” as the heads and horns of “big game” love to decorate their houses with these treasured mementoes of the chase. It had been the fortune--good or bad--of the narrator of the story to visit a house which was not only beautified in this way, but also contained a _human_ head that had been sent home by a member of a certain African expedition and “preserved” by the skill of the taxidermist. When the owner of the head--the _second_ owner--invited the humanitarian visitor to see the trophy, it was with some trepidation that he acquiesced. But when, after passing up a staircase between walls literally plastered with portions of the carcases of elephant, rhinoceros, antelope, etc., he came to a landing where, under a glass case, stood the head of a pleasant-looking young negro, he felt no special repugnance at the sight. It was simply a part--and, as it seemed, not especially dreadful or loathsome part--of the surrounding dead-house; and he understood how mankind itself is nothing more or less than “big game” to our soldier-sportsmen, when they find themselves in some conveniently remote region where the restrictions of morality are unknown. The absolute difference between human and non-human is a fiction which will not bear the test either of fearless thought in the study or of rough experience in the wilds. The temper which makes war still possible in the twentieth century is that which is kept alive and fostered in so-called times of peace by the practice, among other practices (for we do not, of course, assert that sport is the _only_ accessory to war), of doing to death thousands upon thousands of helpless animals for purposes of mere recreation. Peace advocates who declaim against the infamies of war, without taking note of the kindred infamies of sport, have, to say the least of it, not looked very deeply into the subject of their propaganda;[31] and precisely the same holds good of those “lovers of animals” who are horrified at the idea of running a fox to death, but are ready to accept the flimsiest of flimsy sophisms as an excuse for going to war. Sport is, in truth, a form of war, and war is a form of sport; and those who defend such institutions as the Eton Beagles, on the ground that the schoolboys who indulge in them are thereby trained to be the future stalwarts of Imperialism, are fully justified in their contention--provided only that they look the facts of war and of Imperialism in the face. The Etonians who, in the eighteenth century, used to beat rams to death with clubs, and who now break up hares as a half-holiday pastime, have always furnished a large contingent of officers to the British Army. Need we wonder that wars flourish without regard to morality or justice?