In 1912, after a tremendous struggle, the legislature of Massachusetts passed a counterpart of the Bayne law, and took her place in the front rank of states.  That was a great fight.  The market-gunners of Cape Cod, the game dealers and other interests entered the struggle with men in the lower house of the legislature specially elected to look after their interests.  Just as in New York in 1911, they proposed to repeal the existing laws against spring shooting and throw the markets wide open to the sale of game.  From first to last, through three long and stormy months, the Destroyers fought with a degree of determination and persistence worthy of a better cause.  They contested with the Defenders every inch of ground.  In New York, the Destroyers were overwhelmed by the tidal wave of Defenders, but in Massachusetts it was a prolonged hand-to-hand fight on the ramparts. Five times was a bill to repeal the spring-shooting law introduced and defeated!

Even after the bill had passed both houses by good majorities, the Governor declared that he could not sign it.  And then there poured into the Executive offices such a flood of callers, letters, telegrams and telephone calls that he became convinced that the People desired the law; so he signed the bill in deference to the wishes of the majority.

The principle that the sale of game is wrong, and fatal to the existence of a supply of game, is as fixed and unassailable as the Rocky Mountains.  Its universal acceptance is only a question of intelligence and common honesty.  The open states owe it to themselves and each other to enact both the spirit and the letter of the Bayne law, and do it quickly, before it is too late to profit by it!  Let them remember the heath hen,—­amply protected when entirely too late to save it from extinction!

It is fairly beyond question that the killing of wild game for the market, and its sale in the “open season” and out of it, is responsible for the disappearance of at least fifty per cent of our stock of American feathered game.  It is the market-gunner, the game-hog who shoots “for sport” and sells his game, and the game dealer, who have swept away the wild ducks, the ruffed grouse, the quail and the prairie chickens that thirty years ago were abundant on their natural ranges.  The foolish farmers of the middle West permitted the market-hunters of Chicago and the East to slaughter their own legitimate game by the barrel and the car-load, and ship it “East,” to market.  To-day the waters of Currituck Sound are a wholesale slaughter-place for migratory wild fowl with which to supply the markets of Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia.  Furthermore, the market gunners of Currituck are robbing the people of 16 states of tens of thousands of wild-fowl that legitimately belong to them, during the annual autumn flight.  The accompanying map shows how it is done.

[Illustration:  MAP USED IN THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE BAYNE LAW This map shows how the sale of ducks killed on the Carrituck Sound robs the people of 16 states, for the benefit of a few.  STOP THE SALE OF GAME!  (Signed W.T.  Hornaday, March 6, 1911.)]