Fancy an animal with the murderous ferocity of a mink, the agility of a squirrel, the penetration of a ferret and the cunning of a rat, infesting the thickets and barnyards of this country.  The mongoose can live wherever a rat can live, provided it can get a fair amount of animal food.  Not for $1,000,000 could any one of the southern or Pacific states afford to have a pair of these little gray fiends imported and set free.  If such a calamity ever occurs, all wheels should stop, and every habitant should turn out and hunt for the animals until they are found and pulverized.  No matter if it should require a thousand men and $100,000, find them! If not found, the cost to the state will soon be a million a year, with no ending.

In spite of the vigilance of our custom house officers, every now and then a Hindoo from some foreign vessel sneaks into the country with a pet mongoose (and they do make great pets!) inside his shirt, or in the bottom of a bag of clothing.  Of course, whenever the Department of Agriculture discovers any of these surreptitious animals, they are at once confiscated, and either killed or sent to a public zoological park for safe-keeping.  In New York, the director of the Zoological Park is so genuinely concerned about the possibility of the escape of a female mongoose that he has issued two standing orders:  All live mongooses offered to us shall at once be purchased, and every female animal shall immediately be chloroformed.

If Herpestes griseus ever breaks loose in the United States, the crime shall not justly be chargeable to us.

THE ENGLISH SPARROW.—­In the United States, the English sparrow is a national sorrow, almost too great to be endured.  It is a bird of plain plumage, low tastes, impudent disposition and persistent fertility.  Continually does it crowd out its betters, or pugnaciously drive them away, and except on very rare occasions it eats neither insects nor weed seeds.  It has no song, and in habits it is a bird of the street and the gutter.  There is not one good reason why it should exist in this country.  If it were out of the way, our native insect-eaters of song and beauty could return to our lawns and orchards.  The English sparrow is a nuisance and a pest, and if it could be returned to the land of its nativity we would gain much.

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CHAPTER XXXVI

NATIONAL AND STATE GAME PRESERVES, AND BIRD REFUGES

Out West, there is said to be a “feeling” that game and forest conservation has “gone far enough.”  In Montana, particularly, the National Wool-Growers’ Association has for some time been firmly convinced that “the time has come to call a halt.”  Oh, yes!  A halt on the conservation of game and forests; but not on the free grazing of sheep on the public domain.  No, not even while those same sheep are busily growing wool that is so fearfully and wonderfully conserved by a sky-high tariff that the truly poor Americans are forced to wear garments made of shoddy because they cannot afford to buy clothing made of wool! (This is the testimony of a responsible clothing merchant, in 1912.)