permission became a misdemeanor; and then the whole thing was
nullified by reducing the resident license to nothing where a man
shot upon his own land, one dollar in his own county, and two
dollars outside of it. In its practical workings the new law amounts
to this: A few northern gunners have paid the non-resident license
fee, and enough resident licenses have been taken out by the city
sportsmen to make up the handsome salary of the State warden. The
negro still hunts upon his own land _or upon the land of the man who
wants corn and cotton raised_, with perfect indifference to the
whole thing. Who was to enforce the law against him? Not the one
disgusted deputy with three big counties to patrol who depended for
his salary upon the fines collected from the negroes. It would take
one man to every three miles square to protect the game in the
South.

The one effective way of dealing with the situation in Alabama was
to have legislated three dollar guns out of existence with a five
dollar tax, adding to this nearly a like amount on dogs. Hardly a
sportsman in the South will disagree with this conclusion. But
sportsmen never had a majority vote either in the South or in the
North, and the South's grave problem is yet unsolved.

I do not favor depriving the black man of his natural human right to
hunt and shoot. If he is the owner of land, or if he leases or rents
it, or if he does not, he should have exactly the same privilege of
hunting that the white man has. That is not the question now,
however, but how to restrict him to legal shooting, to make him
amenable to the law that governs the white man, to deprive him of
the absolute license he now enjoys to kill throughout the year
without mercy, without discrimination, without restraint. If only