The meat-shooters who harry the game and other wild life in order to use it as a staple food supply; the Italians, negroes and others who shoot song-birds as food; the plume-hunters and the hide-and-tusk hunters all over the world are the guerrillas of the Army of Destruction.  Let us consider some of these grand divisions in detail.

Here is an inexorable law of Nature, to which there are no exceptions: 

No wild species of bird, mammal, reptile or fish can withstand exploitation for commercial purposes.

The men who pursue wild creatures for the money or other value there is in them, never give up.  They work at slaughter when other men are enjoying life, or are asleep.  If they are persistent, no species on which they fix the Evil Eye escapes extermination at their hands.

Does anyone question this statement?  If so let him turn backward and look at the lists of dead and dying species.

THE DIVISION OF MEAT-SHOOTERS contains all men who sordidly shoot for the frying-pan,—­to save bacon and beef at the expense of the public, or for the markets.  There are a few wilderness regions so remote and so difficult of access that the transportation of meat into them is a matter of much difficulty and expense.  There are a very few men in North America who are justified in “living off the country,” for short periods.  The genuine prospectors always have been counted in this class; but all miners who are fully located, all lumbermen and railway-builders certainly are not in the prospector’s class.  They are abundantly able to maintain continuous lines of communication for the transit of beef and mutton.

Of all the meat-shooters, the market-gunners who prey on wild fowl and ground game birds for the big-city markets are the most deadly to wild life.  Enough geese, ducks, brant, quail, ruffed grouse, prairie chickens, heath hens and wild pigeons have been butchered by gunners and netters for “the market” to have stocked the whole world.  No section containing a good supply of game has escaped.  In the United States the great slaughtering-grounds have been Cape Cod; Great South Bay, New York; Currituck Sound, North Carolina; Marsh Island, Louisiana; the southwest corner of Louisiana; the Sunk Lands of Arkansas; the lake regions of Minnesota; the prairies of the whole middle West; Great Salt Lake; the Klamath Lake region (Oregon) and southern California.

[Illustration:  A MARKET GUNNER AT WORK ON MARSH ISLAND Killing Mallards for the New Orleans Market.  The Purchase of This Island by Mrs. Russell Sage has now Converted it Into a Bird Sanctuary]