Country Life
,A Scutt os: Semen
• Sportsmen as a body, in this ease thoroughly in sympathy ith those who are not sportsmen, indeed even with those who are vehemently opposed to all field sports, should unite to condemn certain recent or existing excesses. The year has been wonderfully congenial to pheasants, partridges and, incidentally, to rabbits. Last year was not less favourable ; and the opportunity of killing more birds than anyone had killed before became an ideal that appealed to a number of people : they put the size, of the hag—unlovely word- -• beffire the sport. In the Eastern Counties (where some owners of shoots were jealous of the reputation of Hampshire) over 700 brace a partridges were killed in one shoot in one day. Such a holocaust is achieved by hyperbolic artificiality, which produces the very negation of sport, if that word is to retain any of its better meaning : and it is, of course, widely used to label what is proudly -held to be a peculiar quality of Englishmen.
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