a
single locality in which protection from shooting has been sensible, or
just, or adequate_.

We have universally given our American upland game birds an unfair deal,
and now we are adding insult to slaughter by bringing in foreign game
birds to replace them--because our birds "can't live" before five
million shot-guns!

Our American game birds CAN live, anywhere in the haunts where nature
placed them that are not to-day actually occupied by cities and towns!
Give me the making of the laws, and I will make the prairie chicken and
quail as numerous throughout the northern states east of the Great
Plains as domestic chickens are outside the regular poultry farms. There
is only one reason why there are not ten million quail in the state of
New York to-day,--one for each human inhabitant,--and that reason is the
infernal greed and selfishness of the men who have almost exterminated
our quail by over-shooting. Don't talk to me about the "hard winters"
killing off our quail! It is the hard cheek of the men who shoot them
when they ought to let them alone.

The State of Iowa could support 500,000 prairie chickens and never miss
the waste grain that they would glean in the fields; but now the prairie
chicken is practically extinct in Iowa, only a few scattered specimens
remaining as "last survivors" in some of the northern counties. The
migration of those birds that unexpectedly came down from the north last
winter was like the fall of a meteor,--only the birds promptly faded
away again. Why should New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts
exterminate the heath hen and coddle the ring-necked pheasant and the
Hungarian partridge?

The introduction of the old-world pheasants interests me very little.
Every one that I see is a painful reminder of our slaughtered quail and
grouse,--the birds that never have had a square deal from the American
people! Thus far the introduction of the Hungarian partridge has not
been successful, anywhere. Connecticut, Missouri, New Jersey and I think
other states have tried this, and failed. The failure of that species
brings no sorrow to me. I prefer our own game birds; and if the American
people will not conserve those properly and decently they deserve to
have no game birds.

THE EUROPEAN RED DEER IN NEW ZEALAND.--Occasionally a gameless land
makes a ten-strike by introducing a foreign game animal that does no
harm, and becomes of great value. The greatest success ever made in the
transplant