deeds.

I have seen the whole story of modern American sportsmanship, so
called. It has been class legislation and organized
selfishness--that is what it has been, and nothing else. I do not
blame country legislators, game dealers, farmers, for calling the
sportsmen of America selfish and thoughtless. I do not blame them
for saying that the so-called protective measures advanced by
sportsmen have been selfish measures, and looking to destruction
rather than to protection. At least that has been their actual
result. I have no more reverence for a sportsman than for anyone
else, and no reverence for him at all because he is or calls himself
a sportsman. He has got to be a man. He has got to be a citizen.

I have seen millions of acres of breeding and feeding grounds pass
under the drain and under the plow in my own time, so that the
passing whisper of the wild fowl's wing has been forgotten there now
for many years. I have seen a half dozen species of fine game birds
become extinct in my own time and lost forever to the American
people.

And you and I have seen one protective society after another,
languidly organized, paying in a languid dollar or so per capita
each year, and so swiftly passing, also to be forgotten. We have
seen one code and the other of conflicting and wholly selfish game
laws passed, and seen them mocked at and forgotten, seen them all
fail, as we all know.

We have seen even the nation's power--under that Ark of the Covenant
known as the Interstate Commerce Act--fail to stop wholly the
lessening of our wild game, so rapidly disappearing for so many
reasons.

We have seen both selfish and unselfish sportsmen's journals attempt
to solve this problem and fail to do so. Some of them were great and
broad-minded journals. Their record has not been one of disgrace,
although it has been one of defeat; for some of them really desired
success more than they desired dividends. These, all of them, bore
their share of a great experiment, an experiment in a new land,
under a new theory of government, a theory which says a man should
be able to restrain himself, and to govern himself. Only by
following their theory through to the end of that experiment could
they know that it was to fail in one of its most vitally interesting
and vitally important phases.

But now, as we know, all of these agencies, selfish or unselfish,
have