But the League did not stop at that point: we felt ourselves competent, after years of experience, to carry the war into the enemies’ camp--to hoist them with their own petard by means of the _reductio ad absurdum_, a pretended defence of the very practices which we were attacking. The publication of the first and only number of _The Brutalitarian, a Journal for the Sane and Strong_, went far towards achieving our aims. The printers were inundated with requests for copies, and the editor (as I happen to know) received many letters of warm congratulation on his efforts “to combat the sickly sentiments of modern times.” The press, as a whole, regarded the new paper with amusement tempered with caution: some suspecting in it the hand of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, some of Mr. Bernard Shaw, while one venturesome editor hinted that the humanitarians themselves might have been concerned in it, but prudently added that “perhaps that would be attributing too much cleverness to the Humanitarian League.” So the authorship of the _Brutalitarian_, like that of the letters of Junius, remained a secret; but the laughter caused by its preposterous eulogies of Flogging put a stop for the time to the cry that had been raised in _Blackwood_ by Mr. G. W. Steevens and others, that “we have let Brutality die out too much.” They did not relish their own panacea, when it was served to them in an undiluted form, and with imbecility no less than brutality as its principal ingredient. The Eton Beagles, of course, offered a tempting mark for satire, as it was easy to hit upon a strain of balderdash, in mock defence of hare-hunting, the absurdity of which would be apparent to the ordinary reader, yet would escape the limited intelligence of schoolboys and sporting papers. Accordingly, there appeared in 1907, two numbers of _The Beagler Boy_, conducted by two Old Etonians with the professed purpose of “saving a gallant school sport from extinction,” and with the ulterior design of showing that there is nothing too fatuous to be seriously accepted as argument by the upholders of blood-sports.