I am not disposed to undervalue manly outdoor sports, or to fail to appreciate the advantage to a nation, as well as to an individual, of such pastimes; but they must be pastimes, and not business, and they must not be carried to excess. There is much to be said for the life of a professional hunter in lonely lands; but the man able to be something more, should be that something more—an explorer, a naturalist, or else a man who makes his hunting trips merely delightful interludes in his life work. As for excessive game-butchery, it amounts to a repulsive debauch. The man whose chief title to glory is that, during an industrious career of destruction, he has slaughtered 200,000 head of deer and partridges, stands unpleasantly near those continental kings and nobles who, during the centuries before the French Revolution, deified the chase of the stag, and made it into a highly artificial cult, which they followed to the exclusion of State-craft and war-craft and everything else. James, the founder of the ignoble English branch of the Stuart kings, as unkingly a man as ever sat on a throne, was fanatical in his devotion to the artificial kind of chase which then absorbed the souls of the magnates of continental Europe. There is no need to exercise much patience with men who protest against field sports, unless, indeed, they are logical vegetarians of the flabbiest Hindoo type. If no deer or rabbits were killed, no crops could be cultivated. If it is morally right to kill an animal to eat its body, then it is morally right to kill it to preserve its head. A good sportsman will not hesitate as to the relative value he puts upon the two, and to get the one he will go a long time without eating the other. No nation facing the unhealthy softening and relaxation of fibre which tend to accompany civilization can afford to neglect anything that will develop hardihood, resolution, and the scorn of discomfort and danger. But if sport is made an end instead of a means, it is better to avoid it altogether. The greatest stag-hunter of the seventeenth century was the Elector of Saxony. During the Thirty Years’ War he killed some 80,000 deer and boar. Now, if there ever was a time when a ruler needed to apply himself to serious matters, it was during the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, and if the Elector in question had eschewed hunting he might have compared more favorably with Gustavus Adolphus in his own generation, or the Great Elector of Brandenburg in the next generation. The kings of the House of Savoy have shown that the love of hardy field sports in no way interferes with the exercise of the highest kind of governmental ability.