I am afraid I have already exceeded my allotted time. But, with your
kind indulgence, Sir, I should like, in conclusion, simply to
enumerate a few of the benefits certain to follow the introduction and
enforcement of law and the establishment of sanctuaries.
First, it cannot be denied that the constant breaking of the present
law makes for bad citizenship, and that the observance of law will
make for good. Next, though it is often said that what Canada needs
most is development and not conservation, I think no one will deny
that conservation is the best and most certainly productive form of
development in the case before us. Then, I think we have here a really
unique opportunity of effecting a reform that will unite and not
divide all the legitimate interests concerned. What could appear to
have less in common than electricity and sanctuaries? Yet electricity
in Labrador requires water-power, which requires a steady flow, which
requires a head-water forest, which, in its turn, is admirably fit to
shelter wild life. Except for those who would selfishly and
shortsightedly take all this wealth of wild life out of the world
altogether, in one grasping generation, there is nobody who will not
be the better for the change. I have talked with interested parties of
every different kind, and always found them agree that conservation is
the only thing to do--provided, as they invariably add, that it is
done "straight" and "the same for all."
Fourthly, a word as to sport. I have invoked the public conscience
against wanton destruction and its inevitable accompaniment of
cruelty. I know, further, that man is generally cruel and a bully
towards other animals. And, as an extreme evolutionist, I believe all
animals are alike in kind, however much they may differ in degree. But
I don't think clean sport cruel. It does not add to the sum total of
cruelty under present conditions. Wild animals shun pain and death as
we do. But under Nature they never die what we call natural deaths.
They starve or get killed. Moreover, town-bred humanitarians feel pain
and death more than the simpler races of men, who, in their turn, feel
it more than lower animals. A wild animal that has just escaped death
will resume its occupation as if nothing had happened. The sportsman's
clean kill is only an incident in the day's work, not anxiously
apprehended like an operation or a battle. But pain and death are very
real, all the same. So death should be inflicted as quickly as
possible, even at the risk of losing the rest of one's bag. And, even
beyond the reach of any laws, no animal should ever be killed in sport
when its own death might entail the lingering death of its young. A
sportsman who observes these rules instinctively, and who never kills
what he cannot get and use, is not a cruel man. He certainly is a
beast of prey. But so is the most delicate invalid woman when drinking
a cup of beef tea. Sport has its use in the development of health and
skill and courage. Its practice is one of life's eternal compromises.
And the best thing we can do for it now is to make it clean. We have
far too much of the other kind. The essential difference has never
been more shrewdly put than in the caustic epigram, that there is the
same difference between a sportsman and a "sport" as there is between
a gentleman and a "gent." I believe that the enforcement of laws and
the establishment of sanctuaries will raise our sport to a higher
plane, reduce the suffering now inflicted when killing for business,
and help in every way towards the conversion of the human into the
humane. Besides, paradoxical as it may seem to some good people, the
true sportsman has always proved to be one of the very best conservers
of all wild life worth keeping. So there is a distinctly desirable
benefit to be expected in this direction, as in every other.
Finally, I return to my zoophilists, a vast but formless class of
people, both in and outside of the other classes mentioned, and one
which includes every man, woman and child with any fondness for wild
life, from zoologists to tourists. There are higher considerations,
never to be forgotten. But let me first press the point that there's
money in the zoophilists--plenty of it. A gentleman, in whom you, Sir,
and your whole Commission have the greatest confidence, and who was
not particularly inexpert at the subject, made an under-valuation to
the extent of no less than 75 per cent., when trying to estimate the
amount of money made by the transportation companies directly out of
travel to "Nature" places for sport, study, scenery and other kinds of
outing. There is money in it now, millions of it; and there is going
to be much more money in it later on. Civilized town-dwelling men,
women and children are turning more and more to wild Nature for a
holiday. And their interest in Nature is widening and deepening in
proportion. I do not say this as a rhetorical flourish. I have taken
particular pains to find out the actual growth of this interest, which
is shown in ways as comprehensive as educational curricula, picture
books for children, all sorts of "Animal" works, "zoos", museums,
lectures, periodicals and advertisements; and I find all facts
pointing the same way. The president of one of the greatest
publishers' associations in the world told me, and without being
asked, that the most marked and the steadiest development in the trade
was in "Nature" books of every kind. And this reminds me of the
countless readers who rarely hear the call of the wild themselves,
except through word and picture, but who would bitterly and
justifiably resent the silencing of that call in the very places where
it ought to be heard at its best.
Now, where can the call of wild Nature be heard to greater advantage
than in Labrador, which is a land made on purpose to be the home of
fur, fin and feather? And it is accessible, in the best of all
possible ways--by sea. It is about equidistant from central Canada,
England and the States--a wilderness park for all of them. Means of
communication are multiplying fast. Even now, it would be possible, in
a good steamer, to take a month's holiday from London to Labrador,
spending twenty days on the coast and only ten at sea. I think we may
be quite sure of such travel in the near future; that is, of course,
if the travellers have a land of life, not death, to come to. And an
excellent thing about it is that Labrador cannot be overrun and spoilt
like what our American friends so aptly call a "pocket wilderness".
Ten wild Englands, properly conserved, cannot be brought into the
catalogue of common things quite so easily as all that! Besides,
Labrador enjoys a double advantage in being essentially a seaboard
country. The visitor has the advantage of being able to see a great
deal of it--and the finest parts, too--without getting out of touch
with his moveable base afloat. And the country itself has the
corresponding advantage of being less liable to be turned into a
commonplace summer resort by the whole monotonizing apparatus of
hotels and boarding houses and conventional "sights".
And now, Sir, I venture once more to mention the higher interests, and
actually to specify one of them, although I have been repeatedly
warned by outsiders that no public men would ever listen to anything
which could not be expressed in "easy terms of dollars and cents!" And
I do so in full confidence that no appeal to the intellectual life
would fall on deaf ears among the members of a Commission which was
founded to lead rather than follow the best thought of our time. I
need not remind you that from the topmost heights of Evolution you can
see whole realms of Nature infinitely surpassing all those of
business, sport and tourist recreation, and that the theory of
Evolution itself is the crowned brain of the entire Animal Kingdom.
But I doubt whether, as yet, we fully realize that Labrador is
absolutely unique in being the only stage on which the prologue and
living pageant of Evolution can be seen together from a single
panoramic point of view. The sea and sky are everywhere the same
primeval elements. But no other country has so much primeval land to
match them. Labrador is a miracle of youth and age combined. It is
still growing out of the depths with the irresistible vigour of youth.
But its titanic tablelands consist of those azoic rocks which form the
very roots of all the other mountains in the world, and which are so
old, so immeasurably older than any others now standing on the surface
of the globe, that their Laurentians alone have the real right to bear
the title of "The Everlasting Hills". Being azoic these Laurentians
are older than the first age when our remotest ancestors appeared in
the earliest of animal forms, millions and millions of years ago.
They are, in fact, the only part of the visible Earth which was
present when Life itself was born. So here are the three great
elemental characters, all together--the primal sea and sky and
land--to act the azoic prologue. And here, too, for all mankind to
glory in, is the whole pageant of animal life: from the weakest
invertebrate forms, which link us with the illimitable past, to the
mightiest developments of birds and mammals at the present day, the
leviathan whales around us, the soaring eagles overhead, and man
himself--the culmination of them all--and especially migrating man,
whose incoming myriads are linking us already with the most pregnant
phases of the future. Where else are there so many intimate appeals
both to the child and the philosopher? Where else, in all this world,
are there any parts of the Creation more fit to exalt our visions and
make us "Look, through Nature, up to Nature's God"?
But, Sir, I must stop here; and not without renewed apologies for
having detained you so long over a question on which, as I have
already warned you, I do not profess to be a scientific expert. I fear
I have been no architect, not even a builder. But perhaps I have done
a hodman's work, by bringing a little mortar, with which some of the
nobler materials may presently be put together.