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I have tried to avoid dealing with any such things as these, which may be supposed to come within the region of common knowledge of any beginner in shooting, but another point has troubled me more. I have written a good deal for the press. Articles of mine have appeared in The Times, The Morning Post, The Standard, The Daily Telegraph, The County Gentleman, Bailey’s Magazine, The Sporting and Dramatic, The Badminton Magazine, Country Life, The Field, The Sportsman, The National Review, The Fortnightly Review, The Monthly Review, and elsewhere, and I am afraid that I have unconsciously repeated the ideas running through some of these articles, without acknowledgment to the various editors.

As Colonel Hawker went to school in gunnery to Joe Manton, so did Joe Manton go to school to Hawker in the matter of sport. But we have changed. That those who make guns can best teach how to make guns I do not doubt for a moment; that when they write books on the making of guns those books are regarded as an indirect advertisement is inevitable, but they are none the worse for that, if readers know how to read between the lines, and it is not necessary to go to a shooting school to do that. But when gun-makers add to their business by means of books upon sport and by “shooting schools,” they are turning the tables on us. To that I have no objection. But when it is asserted that shooting schools teach more than the sport itself, as has lately been done, then I think it is time to protest that even if they could teach shooting at game as well as game teaches it (which is absurd), that even then they cannot teach sportsmanship, of which woodcraft is one part and the spirit of sport and fellowship another.