deputies to be paid from fines; hunting upon the lands of another without written permission became a misdemeanor; and then the whole thing was nullified by reducing the resident license to nothing where a man shot upon his own land, one dollar in his own county, and two dollars outside of it.  In its practical workings the new law amounts to this:  A few northern gunners have paid the non-resident license fee, and enough resident licenses have been taken out by the city sportsmen to make up the handsome salary of the State warden.  The negro still hunts upon his own land or upon the land of the man who wants corn and cotton raised, with perfect indifference to the whole thing.  Who was to enforce the law against him?  Not the one disgusted deputy with three big counties to patrol who depended for his salary upon the fines collected from the negroes.  It would take one man to every three miles square to protect the game in the South.

The one effective way of dealing with the situation in Alabama was to have legislated three dollar guns out of existence with a five dollar tax, adding to this nearly a like amount on dogs.  Hardly a sportsman in the South will disagree with this conclusion.  But sportsmen never had a majority vote either in the South or in the North, and the South’s grave problem is yet unsolved.

I do not favor depriving the black man of his natural human right to hunt and shoot.  If he is the owner of land, or if he leases or rents it, or if he does not, he should have exactly the same privilege of hunting that the white man has.  That is not the question now, however, but how to restrict him to legal shooting, to make him amenable to the law that governs the white man, to deprive him of the absolute license he now enjoys to kill throughout the year without mercy, without discrimination, without restraint.  If only for selfish reasons, we of the North should reach to southern sportsmen a helping hand, for by and by the last of our migratory song birds will go down into Dixie and never return.

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Mr. Askins has fairly stated a profoundly disturbing case.  The remedy must contain at least three ingredients.  The sportsmen of the South must stop the unjustifiable slaughter of their non-migratory game birds.  As a matter of comity between states, the gentlemen of the South must pass laws to stop the killing of northern song-birds and all crop-protecting birds, for food.  Finally, all men, North and South, East and West, must unite in the work that is necessary to secure the immediate enactment by Congress of a law for the federal protection of all migratory birds.

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CHAPTER XIII

EXTERMINATION OF BIRDS FOR WOMEN’S HATS[D]

[Footnote D:  In the preparation of this chapter and its illustrations, I have had much valuable assistance from Mr. C. William Beebe, who recently has probed the London feather trade almost to the bottom.]