If, Sir, you would allow me to make one more preliminary explanation, I should like to say that I have purposely left out all the usual array of statistics.  I have, of course, examined them carefully myself, and based my arguments upon them.  But I have excluded them from my text because they would have made an already long paper unduly longer, and because they are perfectly accessible to every member of the Commission which I have the honour of addressing to-night.

SANCTUARIES.

A sanctuary may be defined as a place where Man is passive and the rest of Nature active.  Till quite recently Nature had her own sanctuaries, where man either did not go at all or only as a tool-using animal in comparatively small numbers.  But now, in this machinery age, there is no place left where man cannot go with overwhelming forces at his command.  He can strangle to death all the nobler wild life in the world to-day.  To-morrow he certainly will have done so, unless he exercises due foresight and self-control in the mean time.  There is not the slightest doubt that birds and mammals are now being killed off much faster than they can breed.  And it is always the largest and noblest forms of life that suffer most.  The whales and elephants, lions and eagles, go.  The rats and flies, and all mean parasites, remain.  This is inevitable in certain cases.  But it is wanton killing off that I am speaking of to-night.  Civilized man begins by destroying the very forms of wild life he learns to appreciate most when he becomes still more civilized.  The obvious remedy is to begin conservation at an earlier stage, when it is easier and better in every way, by enforcing laws for close seasons, game preserves, the selective protection of certain species, and sanctuaries.  I have just defined a sanctuary as a place where man is passive and the rest of Nature active.  But this general definition is too absolute for any special case.  The mere fact that man has to protect a sanctuary does away with his purely passive attitude.  Then, he can be beneficially active by destroying pests and parasites, like bot-flies or mosquitoes, and by finding antidotes for diseases like the epidemic which periodically kills off the rabbits and thus starves many of the carnivora to death.  But, except in cases where experiment has proved his intervention to be beneficial, the less he upsets the balance of Nature the better, even when he tries to be an earthly Providence.

In itself a sanctuary is a kind of wild “zoo,” on a gigantic scale and under ideal conditions.  As such, it appeals to everyone interested in animals, from the greatest zoologist to the mere holiday tourist.  Before concluding I shall give facts to show how well worth while it would be to establish sanctuaries, even if there were no other people to enjoy the benefits.  Yet the strongest of all arguments is that sanctuaries, far from conflicting with other interests, actually