between a sportsman and a “sport” as there is between a gentleman and a “gent.”  I believe that the enforcement of laws and the establishment of sanctuaries will raise our sport to a higher plane, reduce the suffering now inflicted when killing for business, and help in every way towards the conversion of the human into the humane.  Besides, paradoxical as it may seem to some good people, the true sportsman has always proved to be one of the very best conservers of all wild life worth keeping.  So there is a distinctly desirable benefit to be expected in this direction, as in every other.

Finally, I return to my zoophilists, a vast but formless class of people, both in and outside of the other classes mentioned, and one which includes every man, woman and child with any fondness for wild life, from zoologists to tourists.  There are higher considerations, never to be forgotten.  But let me first press the point that there’s money in the zoophilists—­plenty of it.  A gentleman, in whom you, Sir, and your whole Commission have the greatest confidence, and who was not particularly inexpert at the subject, made an under-valuation to the extent of no less than 75 per cent., when trying to estimate the amount of money made by the transportation companies directly out of travel to “Nature” places for sport, study, scenery and other kinds of outing.  There is money in it now, millions of it; and there is going to be much more money in it later on.  Civilized town-dwelling men, women and children are turning more and more to wild Nature for a holiday.  And their interest in Nature is widening and deepening in proportion.  I do not say this as a rhetorical flourish.  I have taken particular pains to find out the actual growth of this interest, which is shown in ways as comprehensive as educational curricula, picture books for children, all sorts of “Animal” works, “zoos”, museums, lectures, periodicals and advertisements; and I find all facts pointing the same way.  The president of one of the greatest publishers’ associations in the world told me, and without being asked, that the most marked and the steadiest development in the trade was in “Nature” books of every kind.  And this reminds me of the countless readers who rarely hear the call of the wild themselves, except through word and picture, but who would bitterly and justifiably resent the silencing of that call in the very places where it ought to be heard at its best.

Now, where can the call of wild Nature be heard to greater advantage than in Labrador, which is a land made on purpose to be the home of fur, fin and feather?  And it is accessible, in the best of all possible ways—­by sea.  It is about equidistant from central Canada, England and the States—­a wilderness park for all of them.  Means of communication are multiplying fast.  Even now, it would be possible, in a good steamer, to take a month’s holiday from London to Labrador, spending twenty days on the coast and only ten at sea.  I think we may be