be endured. It is a bird of plain
plumage, low tastes, impudent disposition and persistent fertility.
Continually does it crowd out its betters, or pugnaciously drive them
away, and except on very rare occasions it eats neither insects nor weed
seeds. It has no song, and in habits it is a bird of the street and the
gutter. There is not one good reason why it should exist in this
country. If it were out of the way, our native insect-eaters of song and
beauty could return to our lawns and orchards. The English sparrow is a
nuisance and a pest, and if it could be returned to the land of its
nativity we would gain much.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXVI

NATIONAL AND STATE GAME PRESERVES, AND BIRD REFUGES

Out West, there is said to be a "feeling" that game and forest
conservation has "gone far enough." In Montana, particularly, the
National Wool-Growers' Association has for some time been firmly
convinced that "the time has come to call a halt." Oh, yes! A halt on
the conservation of game and forests; but not on the free grazing of
sheep on the public domain. No, not even while those same sheep are
busily growing wool that is so fearfully and wonderfully conserved by a
sky-high tariff that the truly poor Americans are forced to wear
garments made of shoddy because they cannot afford to buy clothing made
of wool! (This is the testimony of a responsible clothing merchant, in
1912.)

We can readily understand the new hue and cry against conservation that
the sheep men now are raising. Of course they are against all new game
and forest reserves,--unless the woolly hordes are given the right to
graze in them!

Many men of the Great West,--the West beyond the Great Plains,--are
afflicted with a desire to do as they please with the natural resources
of that region. That is the great curse that to-day rests upon our game.
When the nearest game warden is 50 miles away, and big game is only 5
miles away, it is time for that game to take to the tall timber.

But in the West, and East and South, there are many men and women who
believe in reasonable conservation, and deplore destruction. We have not
by any means reached the point where we can think of stopping in the
making of game preserves, or forest preserves. Of the former, we have
scarcely begun to make. The majority of the states of our Union know of
_state_ game preserves only by hearsay. But the time is coming when the
states will come fo