study of the following passage to those who believe in the exalting influences of sport :—
“The subject chosen [i.e., for the murderer to operate on] ought to be in good health, for it is absolutely barbarous to murder a sick person, who is usually quite unable to hear it. And here, in this benign attention to the comfort of sick people, you will observe the usual effect of a fine art to soften and refine the feelings. . . . From our art, as from all the other liberal arts, when thoroughly mastered, the result is, to humanise the heart.”
Mutatis mutandis, we have here the very words of the advocates of Sport. The humanity of the Sportsman is, we suspect, closely akin to that of Tom Tulliver, whom George Eliot describes in the Mill on the Floss as “a young gentleman fond of animals—fond, that is, of throwing stones at them.”
There can be little doubt that the chief strength of sport lies, not in the ridiculous arguments often put forward by its votaries, but in the fact that the institution of the slaughter-house is still regarded by a vast majority of people as necessary and indispensable. There is, of course, a difference between killing animals for food, and that amateur slaughtering which is dignified with the title of sport: the former may conceivably
