It cannot, for instance, be seriously argued that boys whose studies are notoriously endangered by the very numerous athletic exercises--cricket, rowing, football, fives, racquets, running, etc.--in which they are able to indulge, are in need of yet another pastime in the form of hunting hares. Granted that it would be inadvisable for the school authorities to preach advanced humanitarian doctrines to boys whose family traditions and prejudices they are bound to consider, still, it is not necessary to go to the other extreme of encouraging them in familiarity with sights and scenes which must tend to deaden the sense of compassion. From the moral standpoint, blood-sports cannot be regarded in quite the same light as athletic exercises; and there are many persons nowadays who, without raising the question of the morality of field sports for adults, think that the license given to young boys to spend their half-holidays in the “breaking up” of hares is as great a stain on the English public-school system as any of the admitted “immoralities” by which that system is undermined. There is, in the opinion of humanitarians, a grave inconsistency between the insistence of preachers and teachers on the duty of kindness and consideration, and the sanction accorded by the school authorities to practices the very reverse of these. Unconsciously, perhaps, but none the less surely, the youthful minds which are trained under such influences are affected in their turn, and learn to conform superficially to maxims of piety and honour, while practically in their own lives they are setting those virtues at defiance. FOOTNOTES: [22] It should not be forgotten that hare-hunting is also carried on by our naval cadets. Here is an extract from the _Naval and Military Record_ of March 1, 1906, describing a run with the Dartmouth (“Britannia”) Beagles: “Just outside the covert a hare was moved in the ploughing by hounds, and gave a most exciting chase around two fields, and when killed was found to have only three legs.” A fine sport for our future naval officers! [23] It is also worthy of note that a memorial against the Dartmouth Beagles, presented to the First Lord of the Admiralty by the Humanitarian League in 1907, was signed by no fewer than twenty-five headmasters of public schools. As a result of the League’s protests, the grant of public money for the maintenance of this sport was withdrawn. SPORTSMEN’S FALLACIES BY HENRY S. SALT Everyone knows the old story of the Wildgrave, that spectral huntsman who, for the wrongs done by him in the past to his suffering fellow-creatures, was doomed to provide nightly sport for a troop of ghostly pursuers. “The Wildgrave flies o’er bush and thorn, With many a shriek of helpless woe; Behind him hound, and horse, and horn, And ‘Hark away!’ and ‘Holla ho!’”