Connecticut:

Like so many other states, Connecticut has recklessly wasted her wild-life inheritance. During the fifteen years preceding the year 1898, the bird life of that state had decreased 75 per cent. On March 6, 1912, Senator Geo. P. McLean, of Connecticut stated at the hearing held by his Committee on Forest Reservations and the Protection of Game this fact: "We have more cover than there was thirty or forty years ago, more brush probably, but there is not one partridge [ruffed grouse] today where there were twenty ten years ago!"

First of all, Connecticut needs a ten-year close season law to save her remnant of shore birds before it is completely annihilated. Then she needs a Bayne law, and needs it badly. Under such a law, and the tagging system that it provides, the state game wardens would have so strong a grip on the situation that the present unlawful sale of game would be completely stopped. Half-way measures in preventing the sale of game will not answer. Already Connecticut has wasted thousands of dollars in fruitless efforts to restock her desolated woodlands and farms with quail, and to introduce the Hungarian partridge; but even yet she will not protect her own native species!

Men of Connecticut, save the last remnants of your native game birds before they are all utterly exterminated within your borders! Don't ask the killers of game what they will agree to, but make the laws what you know they should be! If you want a gameless state, let the destruction go on as it now is going, with 16,000 licensed gunners in the field each year, and you will surely have it, right soon.

The state of Delaware is nearly twenty years behind the times. Can it be possible that her Governor and her people are really satisfied with that position? We think not. I dare say they are afflicted with apathy, and game-hogs. The latter can easily back up General Apathy to an extent that spells "no game laws." In one act, and at one bold stroke, Delaware can step out of her position at the rear of the procession of states, and take a place in the front rank. Will she do it? We hope so, for her present status is unworthy of any right-minded, red-blooded state this side of the Philippines.

Just why it is that gross abuses against wild life have so long been tolerated in the territorial center of the American nation, remains to be ascertained. But, whatever the reason the situation is absurd and intolerable, and Congress should terminate it immediately. As late as 1897, and I think for two or three years thereafter, thousands of robins were sold every year in the public markets of Washington as food! As a spectacle for gods and men, behold to-day the sale of quail, ruffed grouse, wild turkeys and other American game, half way between the Capitol and the White House! Look at Center Market as a national "fence" for the sale of game stolen by market gunners from Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Pennsylvania.

It is time for Congress to bring the District of Columbia sharply into line; for Washington must be made to toe the mark beside New York. The reputation of the national capital demands it, whether the gods of the cafes will consent or not.