r the
revenue cutter in its primary quality of a foe to smugglers. People who
smuggle come over in the cabins of the finest ocean liners, and the
old-time contraband importer, of the sort we read of in "Cast Up By The
Sea," who brings a little lugger into some obscure port under cover of a
black night, has entirely disappeared.

A duty which at times has come very near to true war service, has been the
enforcement of the _modus vivendi_ agreed upon by Great Britain and the
United States, as a temporary solution of the problem of the threatened
extinction of the fur-bearing seals. This story of the seal "fishery," and
the cruel and wholesale slaughter which for years attended it, is one of
the most revolting chapters in the long history of civilized man's warfare
on dumb animals. It is to be noted that it is only the civilized man who
pursues animals to the point of extinction. The word "savage" has come to
mean murderous, bloodthirsty, but the savages of North America hunted up
and down the forests and plains for uncounted centuries, living wholly on
animal food, finding at once their livelihood and their sport in the
chase, dressing in furs and skins, and decking themselves with feathers,
but never making such inroads upon wild animal life as to affect the herds
and flocks. Civilized man came with his rifles and shot-guns, his
eagerness to kill for the sake of killing, his cupidity, which led him to
ignore breeding-seasons, and seek the immediate profit which might accrue
from a big kill, even though thereby that particular form of animal life
should be rendered extinct. In less than forty years after his coming to
the great western plains, the huge herds of buffalo had disappeared. The
prairie chicken and the grouse became scarce, and fled to the more remote
regions. Of lesser animal life, the woods and fields in our well-settled
states are practically stripped bare. A few years ago, it became apparent
that for the seals of the North Pacific ocean and Bering Sea, early
extinction was in store. These gentle and beautiful animals are easily
taken by hunters who land on the ice floes, where they bask by the
thousands, and slaughter them right and left with heavy clubs. The eager
demand of fashionable women the world over for garments made of their
soft, warm fur, stimulated pot-hunters to prodigious efforts of murder. No
attention was given to the breeding season, mothers with young cubs were
slain as ruthlessly as any. S