Dr. E. C. Selwyn, headmaster of Uppingham, wrote to me if he were made headmaster of Eton, he would abolish the Beagles “at the earliest opportunity.” Unfortunately he was not the successful candidate for the post when Dr. Warre gave it up, or we might have seen some rare sport at Eton, and a hue and cry more exciting than any hare-hunt. Dislike of blood-sport as a school recreation is by no means confined to humanitarians, as may be seen from the following sentence which I quote from an interesting unpublished letter on the ethics of sport, addressed to Mr. Stratton in 1905 by Mr. F. C. Selous, the great lion-hunter: “After reading your pamphlet, I certainly think it would be better to substitute drag-hunting for the pursuit and killing of a hare. To see one of these animals worried and torn by a pack of dogs is not an edifying sight for a young boy.” All hunting, whether of the hare, fox, stag, or otter, has many horrible features: perhaps the very nastiest is the custom of “blooding,” i.e. baptizing with the blood of the mangled victim any children or young folk who partake in the sport for the first time. The practice has been described, but too modestly, it would seem, as “a hunting tradition which goes back to the Middle Ages”; one would suppose it went back to still more primitive times. Yet to this day this savage ritual is patronized by our nobility and by royalty. “Prince Henry was blooded,” was the conclusion of a newspaper report of a “kill” with a pack of fox-hounds, January 9, 1920. There is a double significance, it seems, in the expression “a prince of the blood.” “You can’t eliminate cruelty from sport,” says a distinguished sportsman, the Earl of Warwick, in his _Memories of Sixty Years_. In no form of blood-sport do we more clearly see what a veritable mania this amateur butchery may become than in one of Lord Warwick’s hobbies, “big game hunting,” the difficult and costly pursuit of wild animals in distant lands, for no better reason than the craze for killing. Tiger-shooting is doubtless an exciting pastime, and there are savage beasts that at times have to be destroyed; but what of that other tiger that lurks in the heart of each of us? and how is _he_ going to be eliminated, so long as a savage lust for killing is a recognized form of amusement? For in spite of all the barriers and divisions that prejudice and superstition have heaped up between the human and the non-human, we may take it as certain that, in the long run, as we treat out fellow-beings, “the animals,” so shall we treat our fellow-men.