Games and other performances in which interest is aroused by contending or killing are all of them entertainments gotten up primarily for the amusement of the under-exercised savage within us. The bloody carnivals of the ancient Romans, which seem so incomprehensible to the people of to-day, find their diabolical parallels right here in our high-sniffing civilisation. The bull-pen, where poor quadrupeds are baited by gorgeous assassins for the amusement of Castilian communities, and the cockpit and the prize-ring, where irate fowls and naked thugs peck and pound each other to insensibility for the entertainment of blood-loving mobs, are the legitimate successors of the gladiatorial arena of the Romans. The gladiatorial horror is not changed, either in its nature or functions, by changing the combatants to cocks and bulls. The ringside roars that rise to-day beside the Tagus and the Hudson over the fatal thrust of the matador or the knockout lunge of the pugilist are howls of barbaric elation arising from the satisfaction of the same instincts as those which seventeen centuries ago made amphitheatres thunder at the spectacle of gutted Gauls. The ability to enjoy strife and suffering in one form is not different in kind from the ability to be entertained by strife and suffering in any other form. Beings who can follow in riotous glee the terrified form of a fleeing stag, or shout ecstatically at sight of the death-stagger of a mangled ox, are psychologically equipped to go into raptures over the blood-curdling combustions of a literal hell.