All of this was reversed in shooting, from any participation in which the poor were debarred by enactments made solely on behalf of the rich. Four or five men in a couple of days would offer up hecatombs of slaughtered animals, in doing which they could only justify themselves by the fact that they were acting as poultry-butchers for the supply of the markets of the country. There was no excitement in it,--simply the firing off of many guns with a rapidity which altogether prevents that competition which is essential to the enjoyment of sport. Then our noble Republican would quote Teufelsdröckh and the memorable epitaph of the partridge-slayer. But it was on the popular and unpopular elements of the two sports that he would most strongly dilate, and on the iniquity of the game-laws as applying to the more aristocratic of the two. It was, however, asserted by the sporting world at large that Hampstead could not hit a haystack.
As to fishing, he was almost equally violent, grounding his objection on the tedium and cruelty incident to the pursuit. The first was only a matter of taste, he would allow. If a man could content himself and be happy with an average of one fish to every three days' fishing, that was the man's affair. He could only think that in such case the man himself must be as cold-blooded as the fish which he so seldom succeeded in catching. As to the cruelty, he thought there could be no doubt. When he heard that bishops and ladies delighted themselves in hauling an unfortunate animal about by the gills for more than an hour at a stretch, he was inclined to regret the past piety of the Church and the past tenderness of the sex. When he spoke in this way the cruelty of fox-hunting was of course thrown in his teeth. Did not the poor hunted quadrupeds, when followed hither and thither by a pack of fox-hounds, endure torments as sharp and as prolonged as those inflicted on the fish? In answer to this Lord Hampstead was eloquent and argumentative. As far as we could judge from Nature the condition of the two animals during the process was very different. The salmon with the hook in its throat was in a position certainly not intended by Nature. The fox, using all its gifts to avoid an enemy, was employed exactly as Nature had enjoined. It would be as just to compare a human being impaled alive on a stake with another overburdened with his world's task. The overburdened man might stumble and fall, and so perish. Things would have been hard to him. But not, therefore, could you compare his sufferings with the excruciating agonies of the poor wretch who had been left to linger and starve with an iron rod through his vitals. This argument was thought to be crafty rather than cunning by those who were fond of fishing. But he had another on which, when he had blown off the steam of his eloquence by his sensational description of a salmon impaled by a bishop, he could depend with greater confidence. He would grant,--for the moment, though he was by no means sure of the fact,--but for the moment he would grant that the fox did not enjoy the hunt. Let it be acknowledged--for the sake of the argument--that he was tortured by the hounds rather than elated by the triumphant success of his own manoeuvres. Lord Hampstead "ventured to say,"--this he would put forward in the rationalistic tone with which he was wont to prove the absurdity of hereditary honours,--"that in the infliction of all pain the question as to cruelty or no cruelty was one of relative value." Was it "tanti?" Who can doubt that for a certain maximum of good a certain minimum of suffering may be inflicted without slur to humanity? In hunting, one fox was made to finish his triumphant career, perhaps prematurely, for the advantage of two hundred sportsmen. "Ah, but only for their amusement!" would interpose some humanitarian averse equally to fishing and to hunting. Then his lordship would arise indignantly and would ask his opponent, whether what he called amusement was not as beneficial, as essential, as necessary to the world as even such material good things as bread and meat. Was poetry less valuable than the multiplication table? Man could exist no doubt without fox-hunting. So he could without butter, without wine, or other so-called necessaries;--without ermine tippets, for instance, the original God-invested wearer of which had been doomed to lingering starvation and death when trapped amidst the snow, in order that one lady might be made fine by the agonies of a dozen little furry sufferers.