In dealing with sports and their cost, there is a principle which we must never lose sight of: Sports do not produce money or wealth. Their function is merely to distribute money or wealth when otherwise produced. Is the mode of distribution which we are considering a good one? It is certain that those who decided on expending their money in this manner were not actuated solely or chiefly by considerations of public utility; and considering how difficult it often is to determine what mode of expending a given sum will on the whole prove most beneficial to the public, the chance of our hitting on an almost perfect distribution, when we are looking at the whole subject from a totally different standpoint, seems rather remote. This undesigned coincidence may have taken place, but it is one which, in the circumstances, requires to be strictly proved. I assume that the majority of sportsmen are not fools or bad people. How would such men and women as they are have spent this money if the hunting-field had been closed against them? And would this new mode of spending it be better or worse for the public than the present one? FACTS ABOUT THE GAME LAWS BY J. CONNELL “The Game Laws are the tribute paid by the over-worked and over-taxed people of England to the Lords of the Bread--to the predatory classes who have appropriated the land and depopulated the hills and valleys, to increase their own selfish pleasures. The destruction of the Game Laws is as inevitable in the long-run as was the destruction of Slavery, the repeal of the Corn Laws, the overthrow of an alien Church in the sister isle; but the fight will be a stiff one between the freemen of this country and our savage or only semi-civilised aristocracy and plutocracy.”--ROBERT BUCHANAN. By the common law of England and Scotland, following that of Rome, wild animals in a state of nature are common to all mankind. A legal writer says: “By the very nature of the case wild animals cannot be made the subject of that absolute kind of ownership which is generally signified by the term _property_. The substantial basis of the law of property is physical possession, the actual power of dealing with things as we see fit, and we can have no such power over animals in a state of nature.”