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By JOHN B. BURNHAM

President of the American Game Protective Association

ILLIAM C. GREGG in The Outlook questions "the right of hunters to control or influ

ence the game preservation policy of the United States on the reasonable ground that an interested party makes a poor judge." The quotation is taken from the editorial introduction to Mr. Gregg's article, "How Many Ducks Will You Let Me Kill in One Day?"

I should say that this quotation very fairly epitomizes Mr. Gregg's argument. I do not think it is true.

The idea is an old one, broached long ago by Dr. Hornaday when in one of his circulars he threatened that if the "five per cent" who hunt did not accept his dictum for bag limits and closed seasons he would defeat them with the "ninetyfive per cent" of the people who do not hunt.

The question involved is a basic one of tremendous importance. On its outcome depends the whole future of our game supply. As I see it, the issue involved is whether we shall permit the blind to lead the blind and adopt a doctrine of despair, which through constant reduction in shooting privileges can mean nothing in the end but the cessation of sport so far as the general public is concerned, or whether we shall permit those most conversant with the situation to go ahead with their well-developed plan for preserving and increasing the wild life of the country through modern methods of game administration. The modern spirit is to make each talent produce more, not to wrap the talent in a napkin and bury it in the ground.

I am writing in the friendliest kind of a way, for, despite what Mr. Gregg says, I have never yet succeeded in getting "mad" at Dr. Hornaday in a personal way. I realize the value of criticism, even brutal criticism. It was I who jour. neyed to Washington to ask that Hornaday be added to the Federal Board charged with the migratory bird regulations, and at that time I used as an argument for his appointment the fact that Lincoln kept Chase and Stanton in his Cabinet largely because they were men. of hostile view-point, and therefore valuable as a check on possible mistakes.

"HOW many ducks will

let me kill in one you day?" When Mr. Gregg asked that question, he started a controversy. In this case the controversialists disagree only as to methods. They are both united in wishing to preserve America's wild life.

disingenuous interest governs the decis ion; otherwise, it is merely another of the fallacies which are too easily accepted by those more readily influenced by words than by common sense.

There is no such thing as a disinterested judge. The term is merely relative. In law we try to get the most disinter ested opinion possible, and therefore, so far as permitted, bring our cases before the judge we think will give the fairest

lieve that what they have already accomplished shows them to be the best type of men humanly available to "draw up these laws, lobby for them in National and State Capitols, and act as the chief advisers of the enforcing officials." But first I must remove the implication that as far as I am personally concerned, in addition to wanting to save game for sport, I am also influenced by an ulterior motive. Mr. Gregg, while granting me intelligence and conscientiousness, gives space to Dr. Hornaday's charge that because the American Game Protective Association derives a part of its income from the manufacturers of arms and ammunition, I am therefore prejudiced in favor of unreasonably large game-bag limits. To make the case plausible, it is assumed that the manufacturers want the game destroyed. If the bag limits are too large, there can be no other result.

decision, or, in other words, the judge DR. HORNADAY has done fine work in

whose mental processes are most like our own. We choose our physicians, our lawyers, and our servants on the same principle. We realize the fact that all these people upon whom our welfare de pends, no matter how honest they may be, have their individual mental slants, and therefore are not disinterested. We select the judges, lawyers, and doctors in whom we have confidence, but all the time we know perfectly well their judgments are not infallible.

If this much is granted, and I think it will be granted, I should like to carry on the same illustration and ask what is the next characteristic after disinterestedness we demand in those upon whose judgment we must depend. Is it not the knowledge they possess in their special vocations. A lawyer must know law, a physician medicine, hygiene, sanitation, etc. Before a man can practice a profession, however, he must add to his knowledge acquired by study the experience which comes from practice. We do not intrust important litigations to law students. Judgment is also required to give practical application to knowledge and experience, and character to stand by the decisions made. We can find men with such qualifications, but never, in the strict sense of the term, disinterested

BUT, to return to the question, is it judges.

fair in this instance to say that an interested party makes a poor judge? The generalization is not true even as a generalization, for it presupposes something which must be proved-to wit, that a

It is admitted that the men at the helm to-day in directing the destinies of the game in this country are the "hunters," using the term in the sense which I think Mr. Gregg had in mind. I be

awakening the public conscience to

the cause of Conservation, but through his recent obsession for a panacea which he found in an arbitrary system of closed seasons and reduced bag limits he has got completely out of touch with the constructive spirit of the day. He does not realize that prohibitions are destructive, and not constructive. He does not take into account the fact that in a large part of the country where there is good game administration bag limits have been scientifically adjusted through census studies and game is increasing and that in other places limits are useless without efficient game law enforcement. He ignores the refuges where an inviolate stock is preserved and all the other methods which have been practically worked out and proved.

Is it reasonable to believe that the arms and ammunition manufacturers would want to sacrifice their future for an immediate profit? Is it not more reasonable to assume (as is the fact) that, with their large capital investment, they are vitally interested in the increase of game, so that their business will continue in after years? In all my contact with the manufacturers I have found them to be ultra-conservative Conservationists, who regard the money given to saving wild life as a form of insurance on a par with fire insurance. They are also without exception patriotic men who believe in the value of outdoor sport.

When these men in 1911 offered the necessary support to start a National

game protective association and asked me to take charge, I took several months to consider the question. I knew perfectly well that their motives might be questioned, even though I myself might be satisfied as to their honor. Two factors finally influenced me to take up another piece of hard work at a time when I was tempted by personal desire to retire from the front lines and live a little less stren

York. It directed the entire campaign which resulted in our present system of Federal migratory bird protection. I assume that the reason Secretary Houston appointed me Chairman of the original Migratory Bird Advisory Committee and that other Secretaries have continued the appointment is due to the fact of my intimacy with the subject.

uously. The first of these was that Mr. THE

H. S. Leonard, Vice-President of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, appealed to me on the ground that the country desperately needed a Federal migratory bird law, that all other immediate avenues for securing it had been closed, and that if I refused to take up the work the money would be lost to Conservation. Secondly, Theodore Roosevelt and other leading Conservationists advised me to go ahead with the job. After a talk at Oyster Bay and a subsequent letter, I notified Mr. Leonard I would organize the new association.

After the American Game Protective Association was incorporated and Theodore Roosevelt, John Burroughs, George Bird Grinnell, and men of their type had accepted places in its management, I asked Dr. Hornaday to serve as a direc

tor.

The same motives applied here as in the case of the Advisory Board on the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Dr. Hornaday, however, alone of those I asked, refused to serve.

The original directors were the arms and ammunition men. At the first meeting of the Association each of these men gave me his written resignation, to take effect at my pleasure. The lesser part of our income is still derived from the manufacturers, and they still have representation on our directorate. I believe it is one of the greatest achievements of the Association that their interest in Conservation has been maintained. If they have any ulterior object, it has not yet been disclosed.

The American Game Protective Association has been in existence fourteen years. Its history is written in the record of Conservation, and I have yet to hear unfavorable criticism from any Conservationist of the results it has accomplished. From the start it has been a leader in forward game administration, and it has obtained notable results in many directions, including the protection of song and insectivorous birds, the creation of at least one new National Park and in aiding to preserve the inviolability from despoliation of National Parks, and in many other worth-while movements. It had much to do, for example, in securing the creation of the force of State constabulary in New

HERE remains the question as to whether the hunters or the nonhunters are the best men to handle the game situation. If by the term hunter Mr. Gregg means "game hog," then I am with him in his contention that the hunters are not the proper persons to direct the game destinies; but, as neither Dr. Pearson, Dr. Nelson, nor myself, the men named in his article, despite other bouquets thrown at them, have been so classed, I am inclined to think that when he says hunter he means sportsman in the good sense of the term. If this is so, I do not agree with Mr. Gregg. I think the facts are all on my side. His tory judges men more by their works than by their words. For every great advance in game conservation in this country I can name some sportsman or group of sportsmen as a factor or factors which brought about the result. It would take a longer article than this, however, to give the detail. Men, through shooting, not only learn intithrough shooting, not only learn intimately ways and means of game conservation, but through their love for the wild creatures certain of them become imbued with the desire to work for their welfare. The real beginning of the present-day wild life conservation movement in America can be directly traced to a little group of New York sportsmen who more than half a century ago formed the New York Association for the Protection of Game, with its noble motto, "Non nobis solum" (Not for ourselves alone).

If such men are "interested parties," are they any more so than the lawyer who desires to win his client's case or the doctor who wants to save a patient's life? The sportsman would not hunt if he did not love his sport. He does not want his sport to cease, and, naturally, if intelligent, he desires the continuance and increase of the game supply. Without his work there would be no deer in the Adirondacks, nor grouse in Pennsylvania, and mighty few ducks in the Bear River

marshes. In all these places and many others also there is more game to-day than there was twenty years ago. In the section near New York where Frank Forrester hunted three-quarters of a century ago there is more game than in his day. I will grant Mr. Gregg that there

is very little game in a large part of the Southern Appalachians, but this is due to the fact that the sportsmen's conservation movement has not yet appreciably influenced that section. Other classes of citizens are not sufficiently interested to get out and work for well-recognized measures that would bring the game back to that lovely region. You simply cannot rely on the other classes; if the sportsmen neglect the job, it remains undone.

The attitude that any body of men intelligently interested and informed on a subject should by reason of this fact be debarred from taking action in the matter is something beyond my comprehension. If I had my way, I would make knowledge a prerequisite and permit no man to judge who lacked this knowledge.

Not long ago Frank M. Newbert, Chairman of the California Game Commission, asked Dr. Hornaday by what authority he had made the widely circulated statement that the deer of California were virtually exterminated. Dr. Hornaday answered that for several years past he had been trying to secure a set of antlers from the State, and because he had difficulty in getting them he assumed the deer must be gone. Newbert told him that the United States Forest Service in their latest census credited California with 185,000 deer in Federal forests alone, not to mention other thousands in other forests, and that as California has something over 150,000 square miles of territory, much of which is unsuitable for deer, the figures would indicate a very comfortable abundance per square mile in deer forests.

Newbert then asked Hornaday on what grounds he had similarly stated that bob-white quail had been exterminated by shooting in California. "Did you not know that there never were any such quail in California?" questioned Newbert.

A moment later Dr. Hornaday was asked if he did not consider it necessary to study the game conditions in a State before making recommendations cutting bag limits, and he gave this remarkable reply, which is quoted verbatim:

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Edited by EDMUND PEARSON

The Memoirs of Viscount Grey

Reviewed by W. J. GHENT

O more important personal record relating to the outbreak of the Great War has appeared than Viscount Grey's book. The man who for nearly a decade preceding that explosion directed the foreign policy of Great Britain held a unique position. The British Foreign Office was during those trying years in a special sense an international clearing-house of diplomacy; and Sir Edward Grey (his title before 1916), as the representative of a Government in at least some degree set apart from the Continental scramble and as the steadfast upholder of a policy of peace, was an international arbiter. No man knew more of what was going on, and no other actor in that tragedy can give testimony of an equal value.

It is a sincere record as frank and fair a statement as one will find. It does not profess to give a complete report of the events leading up to the war; it treats, in the main, only of what came within the author's own knowledge. Confessedly, it gives a British view; but the author disclaims the desire either to vindicate or to condemn any nation; rather, he has tried so to relate the facts and his interpretation of them as to enable others to discover means by which another such war will be made impossible. Though to the German militarist party he ascribes the overt act of forcing the war, he holds the underlying causes to be those for which all the contending nations must take their share of blame. His style is colorless and his temper cold; even when he replies to certain reckless charges of the "faking" of documents, he avoids the note of indignation and contents himself with mere disproof.

The reader will find much here that is new-particularly in the matter of British-American relations. There are some new Roosevelt letters, there are fresh views of Ambassador Page and of Colonel House, and there is the text of the remarkable memorandum drawn up by Viscount Grey and Colonel House in February, 1916, embodying President Wilson's suggestions for terminating the war. More than eight months before his

'Twenty-five Years (1892-1916). By Viscount Grey of Fallodon, K.G. With 32 illustrations from photographs. The Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. 2 vols. $10.

second election, it is shown here, President Wilson was willing, provided Germany should refuse a conference, or, accepting it, should prove intractable and overbearing, to bring America into the war on the side of the Allies. Why nothing came of the suggestions is explained at length. Before many months had passed, Germany, learning of the President's intentions, put forth a set of proposals which, the author believes, "may well have made him [the President] despair of anything like a just peace being secured except by the use of force."

But what every reader will study most intently is the account of events leading up to the war. It is a long story, beginning with the Algeciras affair in 1906 and carrying on through three other major European crises to the great climax. It is an admirable narrative, candid and clear, with the details properly subordinated to the elucidation of issues. At the period just prior to the assassination of the Austrian Archduke there is a

Viscount Grey

Photograph by
Lafayette, Ltd.

Courtesy Frederick A.
Stokes Company

pause in order to survey the existing state of things. Then comes the tragedy, and after it come the outburst of passion, the increasing tension throughout Europe, the fruitless efforts to stem the drift toward war. The "blow after blow to the prospects of peace" which followed Germany's rejection of the proposal of a conference seemed to the author like "the deliberate, relentless strokes of Fate, determined on human misfortune, as they are represented in Greek tragedy. It was as if Peace were engaged in a struggle for life, and whenever she seemed to have a chance, some fresh and more deadly blow was struck."

In the retrospect of a decade later Lord Grey reviews the approach to the catastrophe and considers the causes. The remoter causes are obvious enoughinternational rivalry, the increase of armaments, jealousy, suspicion, fear. But the immediate cause, though it will forever be a matter of dispute, is also clear to his mind. France was "most peacefully disposed;" over and over he asserts that France dreaded the war and made every effort to avoid it. England had steadfastly stood for peace, and her small pro-war party had no influence.

[graphic]

That either the Czar or Sazonoff or "any | ECONOMIC TRENDS IN THE ELECTRICAL INDUSTRY one who had a decisive word in Russia" wanted war he refuses to believe. As for Austria, probably neither the Emperor nor the people looked for war; but there were "sinister and reckless influences" at work-"persons and forces. . . capable of any crime and any blunder. In Austria, as in Russia, there was no head with direction and grip of affairs."

[graphic]

He does not believe that war was the conscious object of the German Emperor. The Emperor gave Austria a free hand with Serbia, and when the consequences of that free hand brought on a crisis that only he could have quieted he allowed matters to drift until war was virtually unavoidable; but he could hardly have planned to bring on a general conflict. Bethmann Hollweg and Jagow are also absolved from a belligerent purpose; at any rate, they were powerless. Though the German people, once the war had begun, supported it with "frantic demonstrations and enthusiasm," the fact of itself does not warrant the assertion that by pressure they brought on the war. The most that can be said of them is that "they had not that dread and fear of war that would prompt resistance to the idea of it." The real deciding power lay elsewhere. "The one steady, constant, organized authority [in Germany] was the military one; and there can be little doubt that high military opinion held that war must come and that in 1914 the time for war had come." The influence of German military authority upon Austrian military authority developed a situation which statecraft in the two countries, even had it been most resolutely minded toward peace, could hardly have overcome. Viscount Grey's view of the power of the German militarist party in 1914 is well illustrated in the telegram of the Austrian Ambassador, dated Aug. 7 of that year: "Long conversation with Grey. He is very bitter about the attack on Belgium, and complains especially of the manner in which everything in Berlin has been delivered into the hands of the military, so that he could absolutely never be sure, while he was negotiating, where the authority lay in Berlin." He has found nothing in the eleven succeeding years to cause him to alter this view.

The world has had its lesson; but has it taken the lesson to heart? The war, the author declares, has been a disaster to all, victors as well as vanquished. The great truth that has emerged from the conflict is that no enduring security can be had in competing armaments; that, indeed, there is no security for any Power unless it be a security in which its neighbors have an equal share. There must come, he believes, if civilization is

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