ye who have passed on! Or, rather, let us pray that it is denied to you
to see the men and methods that follow so feebly in your footsteps.
Let me try and compare the going forth to hunt of a rich young man
of the present day, and one of these old hunters. The rich young man
starts, say, from Mombasa--it is the pet place of rich young men,
as it is easily got at, and a non-feverish hunting-ground can be
reached with little trouble. He, the rich young man, is quite often
accompanied by a professional white hunter, who takes all trouble from
off his shoulders, engages his men, runs the whole outfit for him, and
generally acts as male nurse to the rich young man, seeing that he does
not run his valuable head anywhere in the direction that danger might
lurk. He is, as a rule, a first-class shot, so if his charge misses or
maims a dangerous animal, he can always rectify matters. In fact, he
sets the scene, writes the play, acts as audience, and the rich young
man plays the chief part, and the whole thing as much resembles real
big game hunting as the theatre resembles real life.
Of course the running of the caravan is in itself no light work, as the
rich young man would find it terribly uncomfortable to travel with less
than sixty or ninety men, there are so many things to carry, tents,
chairs of different kinds to rest the aching back, tables, dozens of
plates, spoons, forks, and knives, beds, a mosquito-room to dine in,
champagne to restore the rich young man after his fatiguing day, two or
three portmanteaus of clothes--he might get fever if he did not change
constantly, and to sit about in sweaty clothes is very dangerous he has
heard--and then, my God! he might die, if he hasn’t brought a doctor
with him this time: he most certainly will if he ventures back into
Africa again.
The above may seem exaggerated, but I can most sincerely assure my
readers that it is not. It is merely the modern young man’s idea of
sport.
Bah! let me take a deep, clean breath, and get back to talking about
the real men, the hunters of old whom we can respect and look up to,
and feel glad that sometimes they will let us sit at their feet, and
learn from them a little of the wisdom they have massed together during
years of solitary travel. They are always quite modest men, putting
little value on their brave deeds, regarding it all in the day’s
work--though sometimes their eyes will sparkle as they tell of some
great adventure in bygone days. For it is near to their hearts, this
life of wandering, and they would lead no other. To do an unfair or
cowardly act would be an impossibility to these men, they are just good
sportsmen, and they want no fairer name.
How different their hunting! One or two men would carry all they
needed for months of travel; no stock of tinned food here, they ate
what they killed, and if they killed nothing, went without. A little
flour and rice, a knife, a spoon, perhaps a fork!--it was not a
necessity, so why take it? A small tent, a few odds-and-ends, a couple
of shirts. Everything worked down to the lowest limit. Not how much
can we take--the new gospel--but how much can we do without, and they
did without most things. They were there to hunt to the best of their
ability, not to coddle their bodies; they would have been ashamed to do
that at any time, as coddled bodies and clean souls do not as a rule go
together, and these men were essentially clean-souled.
Yes, they were out to hunt big game--man against beast--teeth and claws
against rifle--fair and square we met him and the best of us won.
Sometimes they died of fever, sometimes they were killed by the animals
they hunted--but one thing may be a certainty, and that is that each
and all who met his death did so fearlessly and with no repining. They
had taken the chances, and if the chances were too many for them, it
was all in the day’s work.
How pitifully few of our modern young men will stand comparison with
these old hunters--and it is in the comparing of the old with the new
which brings up the question in one’s mind as to whether it is not
actually excessively wrong from all points of view to hunt in the
manner indulged in by the man of the present day.
The question as to our right in the taking of animal life is bound, I
suppose, to arise in the minds of all who have children to educate,
and who think at all--and I personally find it one extremely hard to
answer, and am fain to make a compromise, which I know is, as a rule,
a great mistake: the young as a rule do not question, they hunt and
take life in a purely heartless fashion, seeming to feel no doubt as
to the right or the wrong of it, and while this is felt I should say
hunt if--and this is a very large if--the hunting is done so that
benefit for mind and body is got from it; but there is little doubt
that, indulged in as it is by the rich at present, it becomes a merely
degraded form of amusement. In the future, perhaps, we shall understand
more clearly and realise more definitely as to whether the taking of an
animal’s life is wrong or not. Let me try and explain what I mean when
I say sport ought only to be indulged in when of benefit to body and
soul.
It seems to me the only permissible excuse for killing ought to be,
firstly, for food; and secondly--by far the most important--that in
the pursuit and killing of game, a man becomes a finer, cleaner
type owing to the life he is forced to lead during that pursuit. It
is a life in the open air. He has to work hard, to lead a primitive
life, and generally has a chance to brush away from his mind and body
the uncleanly thoughts and clothes that are fostered and imposed by
civilisation. He must be independent, relying only on his own strength
and skill; he must live and hunt as nearly as possible as his savage
forefathers lived and hunted, and, having shaken clear of civilisation,
he has time to examine his mind and generally get things into their
proper perspective. He gives himself a chance to face his God and
himself if he does this fairly (and a few months of a primitive, clean
life will make him do it in spite of himself); he will come back
from his hunting trip a better, saner, and stronger man mentally and
physically than when he started, and his hunting will have provided
the object necessary to encourage him to lead this kind of a life. And
now we come back to the question, to kill or not to kill. There are
certain people, but rarely young people, who can go out and lead a
hard, primitive life, for the sheer love of the thing and for the good
of their souls, and not need any definite object to lure them on and
keep their minds busy. But the average man has travelled such a little
way along the big road of thought, that he requires to have something
to amuse the superficial part of his mind while he is straightening and
patching his tired soul and body.
Therefore, if killing is only used as an excuse for leading a clean,
healthy life, and it is done in a sportsmanlike fashion, it seems to
my humble judgment better to hunt and be clean, than not hunt and be
unclean. A compromise, I know, but the only one my poor judgment allows
me. If sport is not undertaken to make a better man of you, nowadays,
when it is not a necessity to hunt to live, then leave it alone, for
it can only deteriorate and hinder. Worthless is the man who goes out
hunting with no reason for his going beyond nurturing his personal
vanity, with the desire only of bringing home so many heads and skins
and showing them off to admiring relations and friends. Only too often,
he cares little if the trophies were gotten in a sportsmanlike manner;
he goes, accompanied by all the trappings and comforts of civilisation,
everything arranged and made easy, often even to having the animals
he hunts found and marked down for him. In fact, he sets forth to
accomplish a series of well-arranged animal murders, and he calls it
sport.
It would be truly instructive, if it were possible, to turn one of
these so-called men loose in Africa out of reach of civilisation, and
make him live as the real hunter of past days lived, dependent entirely
on his own eyesight, skill, and endurance. I very much doubt if one
week would not see him dying or dead, as from constant self-indulgence
from earliest youth, and soft living of all kinds, his eyesight is
rotten, his hearing is of no use whatever, and his staying power,
unless bolstered up by incessant stimulants, does not exist at all.
Unless the hunter of old had had all his senses very finely developed,
he would not have got very far, and Africa would have claimed more
white lives than she has already done.
The unfortunate thing is that this type of decadent young man who
overruns the healthy hunting-grounds of Africa, has done, and is doing,
a great deal of harm to sport. He has more money than brains and he has
no self-respect whatever. Therefore he indulges in a form of sport that
is no sport at all, but merely the seeking of a worn-out, unhealthy
mind after amusement. He goes in for a form of vice in sport, which is
a lust to kill in large numbers--how, does not in the least matter,
it is the quantity that matters; quality even does not attract him
largely, rather three small heads than one good one.
Also, to be cruel is perhaps more amusing than not to be cruel. I do
not think I am wrong in saying that in the old days the man who did
not kill as quickly and cleanly as possible would have been called a
bad sportsman. Boys were brought up to consider sport a very serious
thing, and to be named a good sportsman more or less hall-marked you.
They regarded sport very seriously, these great-grandfathers of ours,
and often in a manner which would appear to us with wider interests
somewhat ridiculous. But the trouble is that sport is still freely
indulged in--big game hunting more than it used to be, since great
distances can now be covered with ease and comfort--and the good old
rules as to what made a good sportsman and what didn’t, have, instead
of becoming more stringent, almost ceased to exist. The high ideals
which the old sportsmen kept constantly in front of them have gone,
and in their place reigns a most unwholesome desire to slaughter at
all costs, which has naturally led to many cruel forms of hunting that
would not have been tolerated in the old days. Fair play for man and
beast was the gospel of the old hunters. Amusement for the hunter is
the cry nowadays, and a poor lot of human beings indulging in a very
poor form of sport is the result.
A ceaseless endeavour to kill dangerous animals, and to remain
perfectly safe while doing so, is, from a sportsman’s point of view, a
somewhat nauseating sight. A favourite device of this sort is tying up
a live animal, such as a donkey or a goat, climbing up a tree to a safe
perch, and from there shooting lions, &c., which will come to devour
the tie-up. The feelings of the said tie-up during the hours of waiting
do not require much imagination to realise.
Hunting a lion with a pack of hounds, four or five men on ponies
with rifles, is another very favourite pastime nowadays. It has its
advantages in being fairly safe--for the men; the hounds, of course,
may suffer. The King of Beasts--would any one recognise him by that
name, as, hunted, winded, dazed by the clamour of many hounds, he tries
to make the long grass?--and, when he does make a break for the open,
it does not matter if one rifle misses, or only wounds him, there are
always two or three more to finish him off before he can retaliate.
If we will not face him on our feet, man and rifle against beast and
claws, would it not be more sportsmanlike to leave him alone? A pack
of hounds and four or six rifles against one lion. Well it is that
you mighty lion-hunters, who, unaided and badly armed, sought out and
killed your lions by sheer skill and bravery, taking all chances, and
only proud if the chances were against you--well it is that you have
passed on; or do your spirits still haunt that land of fascination
and disease, and, perchance, mourn over each great beast that is done
to death by the hands of degenerate creatures, who manage to preserve
their worthless lives against your mighty strength, merely by being
able to entirely obliterate from their minds what the words ‘good
sportsmen’ once meant?
It would be of some interest to know how many lions, of the many that
are killed nowadays, are met face to face, one man on the ground
against one lion. Not so very many, methinks. One hears so much about
the number of lions killed by So-and-so, but the methods of killing
are generally left to the imagination of the listener. I believe
there have been people degraded enough even to trap lions and think
no shame of it. Hardly would this be permissible even if there was a
famous man-eater to be killed, unless every other sporting method had
been tried and failed. Why this type of creature, who does this sort
of thing and boasts of it, is not taken and given a horse-whipping,
and then expelled from decent society, I know not--except that I
suppose the old sense of fairness and good sportsmanship is breathing
its last. I felt this very strongly when in London a short time ago,
I went to see some moving pictures of big game taken in Africa. One
of the pictures remains unpleasantly clear in my memory: it was
that of a hyena in a trap, caught by one leg; it grovelled along on
its belly, tongue out, covered with dust, in an agony of fear, and
showing the hideous misery of despair to be seen only in the eyes of
trapped animals; he ceased his convulsive efforts to get free for the
moment, and he was then stirred up with sticks, so that his struggles
might prove an amusing picture to be shown all over the world. It
was explained during this picture that the trap was padded and could
cause the animal no pain, as if pain of a wounded limb be felt or
matter much to a trapped animal. It is the terrible fear, the feeling
of helplessness and being at the mercy of all comers,--they who have
always been free--look at their eyes; and even if they be sorely
wounded, it is not pain you see there, but sheer, horrible terror,
the terror of the trapped animal, a thing to stamp out quickly by a
merciful death, or, better still, give it back its freedom. It was
also explained that anyway it did not matter much as the hyena was
a horrible animal! Fifty years ago, if moving pictures had existed
and such a picture had been shown to a house full of men, women, and
_children_, I feel certain that it would have been greeted with hisses
instead of the applause it received, and the man who had the indecency
to show such a picture would most likely have visited the nearest
horse-pond. Trapping has been done for years, as a rule to kill vermin,
but it is generally left to paid men and regarded as a disagreeable
necessity. We have come to sorry times indeed when we can regard the
struggles of a trapped animal as an amusing spectacle, and take no
shame in letting our children see such methods of sport. It is not only
in hunting dangerous game that cruelty is indulged in, for it exists
still more freely in the chase of the non-dangerous kind. Little shame
is felt in wounding, and allowing a wounded animal to get away to die
slowly in great pain from his wound, or perhaps to be eaten by one of
the greater hunting animals.
Unless a man is a perfect shot, he is bound to wound sometimes. But
he ought to do his level best to find the animal and put it out of
its pain. Nowadays there seems a sort of slackness about bothering
to go after a wounded animal, which must come from a total want of
imagination, and also from the lack of having it instilled severely
into boys’ minds like it used to be, that to wound and not to kill was
something to be very much ashamed of, and that, if it had been done,
it betokened a failure and a falling-off from the moral standpoint
of a sportsman. When this feeling was strongly developed, men were
more careful how they shot; they would not shoot at animals at a
distance that five times out of six they were bound to miss or wound;
they hunted more carefully, and took more pains about getting within
reasonable distance before firing. The mass of stuff that goes away
wounded in Africa from indiscriminate firing at long distances would
make a vast total if it could be counted up. I imagine boys also used
to be taught a more thorough knowledge of sport. The hunting of the
animals was considered of as great an importance as the letting off of
the rifle. A man was not content to have the beast found for him, and
he himself led up to it, the rifle placed in his hands, and sometimes
told even when to let it off! A good many of the young men of the
present day would be greatly at a loss, I fear, if they had even to
clean their rifles themselves, and to take a rifle to pieces would be
a Chinese puzzle to them.
The old hunters were a mine of information on the countries they
travelled in, and on the habits of the animals they hunted. The
present-day man seems almost as if he were deaf and blind, so little
does he know either about the animals he hunts or the countries he
travels in.
Surely sport regarded merely as a means to get so many heads and skins,
not caring if the lowest and most unsportsmanlike methods are used so
long as so much stuff is collected, must have only the most degrading
effect on the man who indulges in it.
Gone are the days when to live we had to hunt and kill. So if we now
hunt at all, let it be as an excuse to be in the great open places of
the world, bettering ourselves in mind and body. And let us at least
try only to employ sportsmanlike methods, and to follow staunchly along
the road that those mighty hunters of old marked so bravely for us.
RELIGION
It is hardly possible to pick up a newspaper nowadays without seeing
the word education heading many columns of printed matter containing
the views and theories on this subject from all kinds and conditions
of people and from all parts of the kingdom. Most of the newspaper
discussions are generally about the more or less trivial failings
on the part of our modern education, and rarely seem to make any
definite effort to discuss the serious evils which exist, and owe
their existence to the curious lack of reason and understanding in the
rearing of our young. It seems difficult to understand how any one
who has ever given the matter a moment’s serious thought can fail to
realise the hopelessness of the present methods of education, which
the average child of both rich and poor has to suffer from--both during
the period of that education and in their lives afterwards where the
effects of it follow them to the grave.
The evils of modern education are many, and not to be eradicated in a
day; but the great root of most of these evils, and that from which
they all spring, is that our children are given no God to worship, or,
rather, they are given a name, to which they gabble a prayer morning
and night, titter at if they hear mentioned, and thoroughly abominate
on Sundays on account of the boredom and discomfort inflicted on that
day in His Name.
Surely it would be well worth the experiment to replace what is merely
a disliked or ignored name with a real and living God in the children’s
minds, and I think the result would be that education would be helped
farther towards a perfect and sound basis than it has ever been before.
Teach them to have something strong and wonderful to believe in, a
reason for doing the right and avoiding the wrong, a great and splendid
helping presence, a living thought, instead of a hopelessly unjust
and tiresome nonentity, which at present is what He represents to the
average child.
Many people are trying and trying faithfully to find out the cause
of the failure in our modern education; and why, when so much money
is spent, results are so disappointing. Yet it seems to occur to few
that it is building on sand to try and impress upon the brain of a
developing human being the right way of living and learning, and at the
same time giving that human being no true reason as to why that way
is more right than any other way. The extremely young will believe,
perhaps, that because mother or teacher says such-and-such a thing,
that it is right, but the brain a little more developed rejects an
edict given with no reason behind it, and I feel most sincerely certain
that until God is made into a real living and helping thought in the
mind of the young, education will remain much where it is. From our
schools and homes a stream of men and women will continue to issue
forth with indifferent educations, lacking in culture, and with the
lowest of ideals, who are helpless prey to the first and strongest
influences that may seize on them. If the influences are for the good,
all may be well; but if they be for the bad, what help or strength has
ever been given in our education, mentally or physically, to assist in
combating them?
Religion as it is taught to the average child is not only worse than
useless, it is a blasphemy!--a strong word, I know, but a true one;
take any average child, rich or poor, and mention the Almighty to
him or her, and see the result: either a blank and uncomprehending
stare will be the result, or an inane giggle, followed by a bored and
long-suffering expression. Is not that blasphemy? Not from the child,
whose fault it is not, but from the people who are responsible for that
child and its upbringing.
I have travelled in many lands, but only in English-speaking countries
have I found the name of God treated with so little respect and
understanding amongst the young. And yet we call ourselves Christians,
the meaning of which word is followers after Christ. Children are the
most reasonable of creatures, and give them really strong and beautiful
reasons for everything they are asked to do, and they will cling to
those reasons with the greatest of strength and faith. Surely if we
could conquer our curious aversion to bringing God’s name into our
daily lives, except when we wish to take it in vain, it would make a
wonderful difference in the rearing of our children--to try and make
Him into a real and living presence, to help and strengthen in work
and play, not merely a Name to be bored, frowned, and laughed at; and
I feel certain education would show the most surprising results. It is
indeed difficult to understand that any one can seriously believe that
the manner in which religion is taught to children in our schools and
homes can ever have any influence or be of any help to them in their
future lives, still less in their work at school.
I imagine the question that might be asked is: What have the Almighty
and school-work to do with each other? Personally, I think the answer
is, ‘Everything.’ Unless the feeling of God’s presence and help is made
a real thing to children in the little worries, difficulties, and joys
of childhood, unless they learn to turn to Him in those small trials,
they are not, I think, likely when the large troubles of manhood and
womanhood come along to look for help and comfort in the only direction
from which it can come.
The feeling of His nearness ought never to be absent, whether it is
a sum to be struggled with or a page of history to be conquered; the
sum is struggled with and the page of history conquered, not because
of the punishment that might occur otherwise, but because a brain has
been given to us to be taken care of and developed to the best of our
ability, and that to neglect to develop it is to show that a trust God
has given us has been misplaced.
Later in life, when it is not a sum or a page of history that is our
difficulty or temptation, the habit of feeling the nearness of God’s
presence and the responsibility to Him will surely prove a very great
and real help.
Let us at least try to give our children something more than a name
to hold by in their hours of darkness and trouble, and if people who
‘having eyes see not and having ears hear not,’ cry Idealism and
Utopianism, let us take no heed, for all things are possible, even
Utopia.
_London: Strangeways. Printers._
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Contrast of the book cover has been adjusted for readability.
Typos corrected: repeated words printed on page 56, 70, and 80.
Superscripted text has been represented as “text^{superscripted}” in
this edition.
Illustration captions were originally printed on a separate page from
the illustration itself. They have been consolidated in this edition.