About six years ago, Mr. C.C.  Worthington’s deer, in his fenced park, at Shawnee-on-Delaware, Pennsylvania, became so numerous and so burdensome that he opened his fences and permitted about one thousand head to go free.

We are losing each year a very large and valuable asset in the intangible form of a million hardy deer that we might have raised but did not!  Our vast domains of wooded mountains, hills and valleys lie practically untenanted by big game, save in a few exceptional spots.  We lose because we are lawless.  We lose because we are too improvident to conserve large forms of wild life unless we are compelled to do so by the stern edict of the law!  The law-breakers, the game-hogs, the conscienceless doe-and-fawn slayers are everywhere!  Ten per cent of all the grown men now in the United States are to-day poachers, thieves and law-breakers, or else they are liable to become so to-morrow.  If you doubt it, try risking your new umbrella unprotected in the next mixed company of one hundred men that you encounter, in such a situation that it will be easy to “get away” with it.

We could raise two million deer each year on our empty wild lands; but without fences it would take half a million real game-wardens, on duty from dawn until dark, to protect them from destructive slaughter.  At present our land of liberty contains only 9,354 game wardens.[J] The states that contain the greatest areas of wild lands naturally lack in population and in tax funds, and not one such state can afford to put into the field even half enough salaried game wardens to really protect her game from surreptitious slaughter.  The surplus of “personal liberty” in this liberty-cursed land is a curse to the big game.  The average frontiersman never will admit the divine right of kings, but he does ardently believe in the divine right of settlers,—­to reach out and take any of the products of Nature that they happen to fancy.

[Footnote J:  Of this force, there are only 1,200 salaried wardens.  The most of those who serve without salaries naturally render but little continuous or regular service.]

WILD MEAT AS A FOOD SUPPLY.—­We hear much these days about the high cost of living, but thus far we have made no move to mend the situation.  With coal going straight up to ten dollars per ton, beef going up to fifteen dollars per hundred on the hoof and wheat and hay going-up—­heaven alone knows where, it is time for all Americans who are not rich to arouse and take thought for the morrow. What are we going to do about it?  The tariff on the coarser necessities of life is now booked to come down; but what about the fresh meat supply?