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made the sight so fascinating, since it was found that others--all others, it might almost be said,--experienced the same kind of delight. Crowds of people came down to the river to watch the birds; workmen when released from their work at mid-day hurried down to the embankment so as to enjoy seeing the gulls while eating their dinners, and, strangest thing of all, to feed them with the fragments!
And yet these very men who found so great a pleasure in observing and feeding their white visitors from the sea, and were exhilarated with the novel experiences of seeing wild nature face to face at their own doors--these thousands would have stood by silent and consenting if the half-a-dozen scoundrels with guns and fish-hooks on lines had been allowed to have their will and had slaughtered and driven the birds from the river! And this, in fact, is precisely what happened at a distance from London, where guns could be discharged without danger to the public, in numberless bays and rivers in which the birds sought refuge. They were simply slaughtered wholesale in the most wanton manner; in More-cambe Bay a hundred and twelve gulls were killed
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at one discharge, and no hand and no voice was raised to interfere with the hideous sport. Not because it was not shocking to the spectators, but because it was "Sport."
Doubtless it will be said that this wholesale wanton destruction of bird life, however painful it may be to lovers of nature, however reprehensible from a moral point of view, is sanctioned by law, and cannot therefore be prevented. This is not quite so. We see that the Wild Birds Protection Act is continually being broken with impunity, and where public opinion is unfavourable to it the guardians of the law themselves, the police and the magistrates, are found encouraging the people to break the law. Again, we find that where commons are enclosed, and the law says nothing, the people are accustomed to assemble together unlawfully to tear the fences down, and are not punished. For, after all, if laws do not express or square with public will or opinion, they have little force; and if, in any locality, the people thought proper to do so--if they were not restrained by that dull, tame spirit I have spoken of--they would, lawfully or unlawfully, protect their sea-fowl from the cockney
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sportsmen, and sweep the bird-catchers out of their lanes and waste lands.