ADMIRAL ROUS ON COCK-FIGHTING.
TT is, perhaps, just as well that Admiral Rous should have 1 written to the Times a letter in praise of Cock-fighting. The Admiral is careful to say that, the law being what it is, he intends to obey it—a remark which, coming from an admirer of the " sport," is a useful snub to the lawless—and his letter in itself is not of the kind which now-a-days makes converts. Fifty years ago it would have been considered, we fancy, a convincing as well as an elegant composition ; but to-day the most elaborate proof that Themistocles approved of cock-fighting, that Pompo- nius Mela thought it essential to manliness, that Gustavus Adolphus despised the Imperialists for giving it up, that Henry VIII. loved a 'main,' and that "a Mr. Wilson, in the last century," advised Englishmen " never to give up this delicious and pleasant pastime," will scarcely sway the judgment of an Etonian of fifteen. The argument, too, that cocks like fighting, or at all events, like it better than being killed in early life for the table, has been a little used-up on behalf of slavery, battue-shooting, steeple- chasing, and prize-fighting, till it rather wearies the new genera- tion, who, moreover, are not all inclined to believe too much in any assertion of which they never can have any proof. Those of them who mind a little cruelty will ask who cross-examined the cocks, and those who do not will inquire "what the devil the bird's fancies in such a matter signify to anybody." The letter will do no harm to poultry, and it may do this good to human beings, that they will be forced just in the nick of time to consider whetherthe wealthy " roughs," who, full of money and food and leisure, are en- deavouring to revive this sport, really have anything to say for them- selves. A sort of mania for cock-fighting has broken out in the North, and though Magistrates are doing their duty, and the police support the law, it is quite evident that a good many people much above the colliers think the only offence involved in the practice consists in the breach of law. The Admiral has spoken up for them pluckily enough, and in spite of his school-boy notion of authorities, has put their case as well as it is at all likely to be put ; and to what, when it is examined, does the case amount ? Merely to this,—that the habitual observation of cocks bravely killing one another tends to develop manliness, and particularly that kind of manliness which makes men better soldiers. Whether this development is effected by making the spectators braver, or by making them more "passionately emulous of glory," as Pomponius Mela and the Emperor Severus appear to have thought, does not distinctly appear in Admiral Rous's letter ; but we will give him the benefit of either explanation, and ask him to give of either some little fraction of convincing evidence. Themis- tocles's opinion is not conclusive at all. Greeks liked cock-fighting and were brave, but Bengalees like cock-fighting and are not. Clearly the a priori argument is all against Admiral Rous. That a man can be made more brave by habitually encountering danger, and more emulous of glory by seeing that those whom he respects are emulous of it too, may be admitted without controversy ; and we should admit at once, as many humanitarians decline to do, that courage, besides being useful, is a virtue, and the desire of glory, under the regulations imposed on all other passions, an unobjectionable motive force. We might even go the length of allowing, to save argument, that as we should not hesitate to vote for a conscription if the country were in danger, we should, if the Admiral's proposition were proved, consider before we .rejected the proposal for a conscription of cocks. If men may be forced to fight on proper occasions, birds may be forced to fight to make men fight the better. It is not the consequence, but the premiss, to which we take exception to- day. How can courage be developed by delight, by an ecstasy produced by a scene involving no suffering to the spectator, by presence at " a delicious and pleasant pastime," in which there is for the audience no risk at all? The bird could kill no one, even if it escaped. Rochefoucauld, if we remember his epigram right,
had a preference for displaying his energy in enduring the spec- tacle of the sufferings of other people, but even he never said, in his bitterest mood, that watching them made him brave. Or how can man catch the love of glory from seeing that a cock, when he is fighting, and especially when he is victorious, performs actions which seem to indicate to military imaginations that he is inspired by it? People are influenced by example, but it is not the example of the inferior animals, else why should not cock- fighters get the habit of crowing, or become tainted with that spirit of boastfulness which is certainly the most strongly-marked characteristic of victorious Chanticleer? Is it only the good, and
not the bad, which man can catch from quarrelsome birds, or ought Bayard to have crowed ? Prima facie, one would have said that the men who trained birds to fight and enjoyed in safety a vicarious contest would not be manly persons, and as a rule that suspicion would be correct. Admiral Rous is manly enough, no doubt, but he owes his manliness a good deal more to years of contest with the sea, with rough sailors, and with the human intolerance of discipline in his own heart, than to the ten "mains" he fought, forty-seven years ago, with the Chinese merchant at Malacca, and which he recalls now with such proud gleesomeness. If that be not true, why is not his Chinese opponent, who fought these ten "mains," and doubtless a thousand more, as manly as himself? He did all that Admiral Rous did, and more, and for all that was probably an obese coward, and certainly not the sort of man on whom the Emperor Severus or the gallant old lover of horse-flesh would have preferred to rely in action. How does it happen that the races which indulge perpetually in cock-fight- ing—the Chinese, Philippine Islanders, and especially the Javanese —are more effeminate than Englishmen. They are devoted to cock- fighting, and pursue their amusement under the very best circum- stances, breaking no law and suppressing no humanitarian scruples of conscience, and yet they display very much less of the soldier- spirit than do the Englishmen who think that feeding birds into fierceness, and providing them with deadly weapons, and setting them on to kill each other in a kicking-match, is, on the whole, a rather discreditable practice. Which regiment would Admiral Rous rather command,—one composed of Cameronians who hated cock-fighting, or one of Javanese whose notion of enjoyment from childhood has been to see the brave little bipeds bleed ? A Neapolitan "loafer" makes a good soldier enough, we believe, but does Admiral Rous seriously think him a manlier person than the sort of English policeman who goes pell-mell into a crowd of colliery "roughs," in order that he may lose his chance of seeing the sport of which the Neapolitan gets his fill? In Quito cock-fighting is a public amusement. Great cock-fights go on every Sunday and Thursday, the fights, says Professor Orton, are bonci fide, and so deep is the interest excited that the Municipality clears £240 a year from a small tax on bets. Yet the Ecuadorians are hardly the people whom Admiral Rous would specially select for the admira- tion of his friends. Admiral Rous doubtless believes, with other Englishmen of his kind, that the Bengalee is the most cowardly of mankind, yet the Bengalee has for centuries amused his leisure by training the mina, a little variety of the parrot, to fight, and he does fight as bravely as the best game-cock ever bred, or as that bad-tempered little pet of the ballad-makers, the robin redbreast, or as that bravest and stupidest of English vermin, the common ferret. Or can men learn from little game-cocks the emulousness of glory, which they cannot learn from little parrots? Well, the mina does not crow, or flap his wings, or strut when he has conquered, but he looks glad enough. The truth is that this kind of excitement appeals much more strongly to the indolent and effeminate than to the manly, and that what in the latter is a mere taste in the former becomes a passion, which when gratified to the full leaves them as little manly as before. People may be made manly by sport when it involves either danger or exercise, but a sport which consists in watching two birds in a passion can no more increase a man's manliness than watching billiards can increase his skill in turning ivory cubes. We do not, of course, say that such spectacles diminish courage. Our forefathers were brave and emulous of glory, though they were given to wit- ness bear-baitings and dog-fights ; but they were not more brave or more emulous of glory than the Ironsides, who put down both sports ; and not less brave or emulous of glory than the courtiers of Lucknow, who were brought up on the more provocative diet of combats between the wildest and most ferocious beasts of the jungle. If cock-fighting makes an English " rough " a better soldier, what sort of a hero ought not a Lucknow " rough " to have been ? But he wasn't, nevertheless.
Admiral Rous, however, may say that he likes cock-fighting, • and ask why the law should interfere with his amusement, when it does not interfere with pigeon-shooting, or fishing with worms, or playing with a fine salmon on your hook. The difference seems to us tolerably clear. The fish's suffering, if it suffers, which is doubtful, is an incident of its capture for food, and fishes are, like fleas or worms, too far removed from man's sympathies for their suffering to injure his mind. The pigeon ought to be protected, but even at Hurlingham, the motive is not to cause suffering, but immediate death in an unusually painless way, and the suffering which is caused by want of skill is at once contrary to the intention of the performer and invisible to his eyes. But in a cock-fight, as in a dog-fight or a bear-baiting, the suffering is visible, and is an essential part of the sport, which is spoiled by the too early death of one of the combatants. The wish of the man who sets his game-cock to fight is to see his adversary resist after his eye has been kicked out, and his comb torn, and his breast made full of wounds, and his spur covered with blood—not to see him killed at the first spring. A spectacle of that kind brutalises, and would, if permitted, breed in the spectators a desire for stimulants, which would only be satisfied, or rather would only reach its limit—for it is never satisfied—when gladiators were killing each other by eighty pairs at a time within an arena, sur- rounded by men as brave as Admiral Rous, though, let us hope, endued with a callousness which he can never feeL That was the development of the practice in ancient Rome, and we see nothing in Englishmen which should distinguish them so much from those stout old swordsmen. Their nerve is not so much less, or their polish so much greater. " They are Christians," indig- nantly cries the Admiral,—" Christians, and not Pagans." Ali ! well, that may be the difference; and if Admiral Rous will accept the Christian creed as absolute law, we are content to leave the morality of cock-fighting to his own decision.
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