The only method which would have any likelihood of really protecting the animals would be to make it penal for anyone to kill any of them, or to have in his possession any skin, skull, or other “souvenir.” Without their trophies and without the possibility of recounting their exploits to their admiring readers, the big-game hunters would lose their main stimulus, and might devote their time and energies to some more useful and less barbarous pursuit. BLOOD-SPORTS AT SCHOOLS THE ETON HARE-HUNT. We are often told that the true way to teach kindness to animals is “to begin with the young.” Let us see how they begin with the young at the chief of English public schools. “I have told the Master of the Beagles that he must not do anything which is unlawful. I am sure that he would not do anything cruel willingly. But until the common sense of the nation expresses itself in the shape of a law forbidding the hunting of wild animals, I cannot interfere with the Beagles, which are here an old institution.” Such were the terms in which Dr. Warre, when Headmaster of Eton, expressed his refusal--his first of many refusals--to substitute a drag-hunt for the hare-hunt now in favour at Eton College; and his argument has since been the subject of much humanitarian protest, and of not a few memorials to the Governing Body. But there is one point concerning Dr. Warre’s remarks which seems to have almost escaped attention--that the Eton Beagles are not, after all, so old an “institution” as his words would imply, in the sense of being recognised and encouraged by the school authorities, for, as a matter of fact, they have only been openly permitted since about sixty years ago, and they were not actually legalised until 1871. In the old Eton Statutes of Henry VI. it was ordained under the head of “Discipline” that “no one shall keep in the college any hounds, nets, ferrets, hawks, or falcons for sport,” and for this reason the authorities long refused to give official recognition to the Beagles. In the reign of Dr. Keate the hunt, according to Mr. Wasey Sterry’s book on Eton, was “unlawful, though winked at,” and this state of affairs continued until about the middle of the past century, when the Beagles began to be regarded as on a par with cricket and football. At last, under the revised Statutes framed by the new Governing Body, which was called into being by the Public Schools Act of 1868, all earlier regulations were repealed, and the Beagles became legalised, having thus passed through the three successive stages of being prohibited, winked at, and recognised as “an old Eton institution.”