[Illustration:  SHALL WE LEAVE ANY ONE OF THEM OPEN?]

As reasoning beings, it is our duty to heed the lessons of history, and not rush blindly on until we perpetrate a continent destitute of wild life.

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CHAPTER II

EXTINCT SPECIES OF NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS

For educated, civilized Man to exterminate a valuable wild species of living things is a crime.  It is a crime against his own children, and posterity.

No man has a right, either moral or legal, to destroy or squander an inheritance of his children that he holds for them in trust.  And man, the wasteful and greedy spendthrift that he is, has not created even the humblest of the species of birds, mammals and fishes that adorn and enrich this earth.  “The earth is THE LORD’S, and the fulness thereof!” With all his wisdom, man has not evolved and placed here so much as a ground-squirrel, a sparrow or a clam.  It is true that he has juggled with the wild horse and sheep, the goats and the swine, and produced some hardy breeds that can withstand his abuse without going down before it; but as for species, he has not yet created and placed here even so much as a protozoan.

The wild things of this earth are not ours, to do with as we please.  They have been given to us in trust, and we must account for them to the generations which will come after us and audit our accounts.

But man, the shameless destroyer of Nature’s gifts, blithely and persistently exterminates one species after another.  Fully ten per cent of the human race consists of people who will lie, steal, throw rubbish in parks, and destroy forests and wild life whenever and wherever they can do so without being stopped by a policemen and a club.  These are hard words, but they are absolutely true.  From ten per cent (or more) of the human race, the high moral instinct which is honest without compulsion is absent.  The things that seemingly decent citizens,—­men posing as gentlemen,—­will do to wild game when they secure great chances to slaughter, are appalling.  I could fill a book of this size with cases in point.

To-day the women of England, Europe and elsewhere are directly promoting the extermination of scores of beautiful species of wild birds by the devilish persistence with which they buy and wear feather ornaments made of their plumage.  They are just as mean and cruel as the truck-driver who drives a horse with a sore shoulder and beats him on the street.  But they do it!  And appeals to them to do otherwise they laugh to scorn, saying, “I will wear what is fashionable, when I please and where I please!” As a famous bird protector of England has just written me, “The women of the smart set are beyond the reach of appeal or protest.”

To-day, the thing that stares me in the face every waking hour, like a grisly spectre with bloody fang and claw, is the extermination of species.  To me, that is a horrible thing.  It is wholesale murder, no less.  It is capital crime, and a black disgrace to the races of civilized mankind.  I say “civilized mankind,” because savages don’t do it!