putting his dinner aside, the Englishman's sport is often not far removed from barbaric. Look at coursing! What can be the nature that can take _pleasure_ in seeing an absolutely defenceles animal let out in a confined space, with no chance of escape, no fair play at all, nothing in front of it but certain death whichever way it turns? What can be the nature which can _enjoy_ the death-scream of the agonized hare as the dogs' fangs dig into the quivering flesh? Coursing is nothing more nor less than an absolutely degrading sport to the beholders. There is no _sport_, in the right acceptation of the word, in it at all. At any rate, there is far more of the element of real sport in fox-hunting or in stag-hunting, especially in those districts where one is told that the stag practically enters into the spirit of the game, when, after a good run, it pauses, and is helped into the cart which is to take it into "home cover" again! Be that as it may, at least there is some fair play to the quarry. In coursing that is an unknown quantity. "The accomplished Englishman shoots for sport. Sport, being a mental impulse or appetite, is insatiable, and therefore far more deadly than hunger.... A boast is made that ninety millions of rabbits are reared for the consumption of our nation. Ninety million rabbits sent out at large to nibble the young shoots of the growing crops--each of whom destroys and wastes ten times what a tame rabbit would eat in a hutch--are boasted of as an increase of our supplies! If twenty million of these reach the town markets, it is much; how many beside are cruelly massacred with no profit to man! and how many beside, with unhappy hares, foxes, rats, stoats, and weasels, are held for days and nights in lingering torture by horrible steel traps? All this goes on in the midst of refinement, without prohibition from men or remonstrance from women. It is a fruit of the modern English system of game preserving;... and the artificial love of sport which cruel Norman tradition has fostered in the stolid Anglo-Saxon race." [Footnote: "On Cruelty" (_Miscellanies_, III, by Francis W. Newman).] It is an unassailable truth that if you look for the last remains of barbarity in a civilized nation you will find them in their sports. But I confess that to me it is difficult to justify a _woman's_ love of sport when it is combined--before her very eyes--with the suffering of an animal. Yet I heard only the other day of a woman who boasted that she had been among the few "in at the death" one day in fox- hunting, and that when the brush was given to her, her face was _spattered with the blood of the fox_. To turn to another "barbarism of civilization"--the subject of the Drink Traffic.