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Jan., 1913 EDITORIAL NOTF?S AND NEWS 45 The California Associated Societies far the Conservation of Wild Life, of which the Cooper Club is a member, has practically con- centrated its attention on the proposed bill prohibiting the sale of game. The measure as drawn up is in ideally good hands. Senator William R. Flint, popular, influential and able, has already introduced the bill. Communications and editorials from alt over the State and the United States are be- ing received demanding that the sale of game be prohibited. A book by Dr. Wm. T. Hornaday, Director of the New York Zoologi- cal Park, just issued, says California's game is doomed unless a non-sale law is passed at once. The National Association of Audubon Societies, the New York Zoological Society, and the Campfire Club of America are urg- ing California to join the distinguished roll of eighteen states that have entirely prohibited the sale of game. Now! Every read. er of Tx? CoN?oR, and especially every Cooper Club member, .who believes in the justice of this cause, can ren- der effective help by writing immediately to his Assemblyman and Senator as well as .to Hon. George J. Hans, Chairman Senate Com- mittee on Fish and Game, and Hon. John H. Guill, Chairman Assembly Committee on Fish and Game, requesting their support for the Flint bill, prohibiting the sale of game, Write also to Senator Flint, assuring him of yore hearty support. The following extract from an editorial in the FReSNo R?:?u?Lm^? makes short work of the absurd claim that the man who does not hunt is deprived of a natural right if he can- not buy game to eat. The great mass of people hunt for sport; only the hotelman and the market gunner hunt for private pockets in order that lazy Croesus may "buy a duck when he wants it !" "They will simply have to go without it for awhile," was the reply made at a hearing in Sacramento to the query what the people who do not shoot will do for game, pending the development of its commercial production for sate. And the Examiner takes this as a con- fession of the absurdity, and injustice of the whole 'scheme of reserving wild game from tame commerce. But why not? Are the only privileges to be those of money? Are we so commercialized that the normal way of getting everything must be to buy it? There are plenty of things --diamonds and champagne and automobiles, for instance--that most people must go with- out. Those who can afford these things see no injustice in the exclusion of those who cannot. The exclusion is commercial, and therefore, to the commercial-minded, it is con-. ctusive. But when any other standard of dis- tinction is suggested, by which they would be the excluded ones, then they grow right- eously indignant. Yet once it was. quite axio- matic that all good things belonged to the strong as it now is that they belong to the rich. The mighty hunter had the game, the mighty warrior the government and the mighty miser his gold heaps--unless the war- rior and the hunter took them away from him. The mighty thinker, then as now, had no privilege but the hope of posterity's recog- nition. But now the mighty miser demands the first fruits of all the others; and sets him-- self up as the only privileged class. That the game should be the privilege of the hunter strikes him as an invasion of his own right to monopolize all privileges to himself. Yet already most of the best things of life are attainable only by other processes than purchase. The best part, even of the game, ?s not the eating, but the hunting of it. Pam- pered Croesus, at Delmonico's may eat his canvasback, and carp because it was on the fire nineteen minutes instead of eighteen. But who shall buy the sunrise, the tang o?[ the morning air, the mists on the salt marshes, the spell of the hunting and the triumph of the successful shot? Ten thousand generations of hunting ancestry bequeathed us the instinct whose sat- isfaction is the hur?tsman's joy. But it is a thing to be achieved by stout legs, clear eyes and steady nerve, and is for sale to no fat purse except for personal exertion also. Is it imperative thai the mere incidental gastro- nomic product of that uncommerciaI activity shall be open to commercial access? The two finest mountain views on the 'American continent are doubtless those from the' summits of Mt. Whitney and Mt. ? Dana. They are open to any man with strong legs and sound lungs, and the price of beans and bacon, but a million dollars will not carry a man to them. in a Pullman car. The love of a good woman is one man's freely, for his own devotion in return, but it is no man's for pay. Money will buy books and pictures and music, but not the knowledge to appreciate them. And the touch with wild things, and the hereditary lure of the wild man's chase for them--these are something better than buying and selling. If, to preserve the wild poesies and to keep alive the untamed pur- suit of them, it becomes necessary to separate the products of the hunt from organized com- merce, until commerce itself can produce what it consumes, there is no injury done except to the tiction that all things are the natural right of him who is able to pay for them.--W. P. T. REPORT OF PROGRESS IN CONSER- VATION To contingent organizations making up the