In Recreation Magazine for May, 1909, Mr. Charles Askins published a most startling and illuminating article, entitled “The South’s Problem in Game Protection.”  It brought together in concrete form and with eye-witness reliability the impressions that for months previous had been gaining ground in the North.  In order to give the testimony of a man who has seen what he describes, I shall now give numerous quotations from Mr. Askins’ article, which certainly bears the stamp of truthfulness, without any “race prejudice” whatever.  It is a calm, judicial, unemotional analysis of a very bad situation:  and I particularly commend it alike to the farmers of the North and all the true sportsmen of the South.

In his opening paragraphs Mr. Askins describes game and hunting conditions in the South as they were down to twenty years ago, when the negroes were too poor to own guns, and shooting was not for them.

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SPECIAL WORK OF THE SOUTHERN NEGROES.

It is all different now, says Mr. Askins, and the old days will only come back with the water that has gone down the stream.  The master is with his fathers or he is whiling away his last days on the courthouse steps of the town.  Perhaps a chimney or two remain of what was once the “big house” on the hill; possibly it is still standing, but as forlorn and lifeless as a dead tree.  The muscadine grapes still grow in the swale and the persimmons in the pasture field, but neither ’possum nor ’coon is left to eat them.  The last deer vanished years ago, the rabbits died in their baby coats and the quail were killed in June.  Old “Uncle Ike” has gone across the “Great River” with his master, and his grandson glances at you askance, nods sullenly, whistles to his half breed bird dog, shoulders his three dollar gun and leaves you.  He is typical of the change and has caused it, this grandson of dear old Uncle Ike.

In the same way the white man is telling the black to abide upon the plantation raising cotton and corn, and further than this nothing will be required of him.  He can cheat a white man or a black, steal in a petty way anything that comes handy, live in marriage or out of it to please himself, kill another negro if he likes, and lastly shoot every wild thing that can be eaten, if only he raises the cotton and the corn.  But the white sportsmen of the South have never willingly granted the shooting privilege in its entirety, and hence this story.  They have told him to trap the rabbits, pot the robins, slaughter the doves, kill the song birds, but to spare the white sportsman’s game, the aristocratic little bobwhite quail.

In the beginning not so much damage to southern game interests could be accomplished by our colored man and brother, however decided his inclinations.  He had no money, no ammunition and no gun.  His weapons were an ax, a club, a trap, and a hound