THE CALLOUSNESS OF FOX-HUNTING. BY H. B. MARRIOTT WATSON 95 BIG GAME HUNTING. BY ERNEST BELL 101 BLOOD-SPORTS AT SCHOOLS. BY AN OLD ETONIAN 116 FALLACIES OF SPORTSMEN. BY HENRY S. SALT 130 APPENDIX BY THE EDITOR I. SPORT AS A TRAINING FOR WAR 149 II. “BLOODING” 155 III. THE HUNTING OF GRAVID ANIMALS 158 IV. DRAG-HUNT _VERSUS_ STAG-HUNT 162 V. CLAY PIGEON _VERSUS_ LIVE PIGEON. BY THE REV. J. STRATTON 166 VI. COURSING 170 VII. THE GENTLE CRAFT 174 VIII. SPOILING OTHER PEOPLE’S PLEASURE 179 INDEX 183 PREFACE[1] BY BERNARD SHAW Sport is a difficult subject to deal with honestly. It is easy for the humanitarian to moralize against it; and any fool on its side can gush about its glorious breezy pleasures and the virtues it nourishes. But neither the moralizings nor the gushings are supported by facts: indeed they are mostly violently contradicted by them. Sportsmen are not crueller than other people. Humanitarians are not more humane than other people. The pleasures of sport are fatigues and hardships: nobody gets out of bed before sunrise on a drizzling wintry morning and rides off into darkness, cold, and rain, either for luxury or thirst for the blood of a fox cub. The humanitarian and the sportsman are often the self-same person drawing altogether unaccountable lines between pheasants and pigeons, between hares and foxes, between tame stags from the cart and wild ones from the heather, between lobsters or _paté de foie gras_ and beefsteaks: above all, between man and the lower animals; for people who are sickened by the figures of a _battue_ do not turn a hair over the infantile deathrate in Lisson Grove or the slums of Dundee.