Chapter VI: Part 6

The special application of the word “vivisection” to physiological experiments has led to a belief, in many minds, that the vivisecting scientist is the sole torturer of animals. This is unjust both to the laboratory and to its victims. The crusade against vivisection would be much strengthened if those who take part in it would remember that the cruelties of science are only part of the great sum of cruelty that in various forms disgraces the dealings of mankind with the lower animals. Granted that the worst barbarities of the vivisector exceed those of the sportsman or the slaughterman, both in duration and intensity, it is still a fact, as scientists have often pointed out, that there are other tortures than those of the laboratory, and that to some of these the name “vivisection” might as accurately be applied. For example, clumsy castration of domestic animals, as the law is beginning to recognize, is nothing less than “farmyard vivisection”; the “docking” of horses’ tails is vivisection in a very revolting form; in the seal-fishery the wretched victims of “fashion” have often been skinned alive; nor can it be pretended that the torture of the egrets, flung aside to die when their nuptial plumes have been torn off, demands a milder name than vivisection; yet some zoophilists, who look upon a vivisecting physiologist as a fiend, do not hesitate to wear an aigrette or a sealskin cloak, or to be the owners of docked horses or cropped dogs. It is impossible to draw a strict line of division between those barbarities which amount to torture and those which fall short of it, and it is convenient that the cruelties of sport and fashion should be dealt with under a separate head; nevertheless there is one other practice on which a few words must be spoken before this chapter is closed.

Under the antiquated methods of transport and butchery still permitted in England, it is impossible to doubt that something not far removed from torture is often practised in the cattle trade; for which reason, while aware that in vegetarianism lies the only full solution of the diet-question, humanitarians have long pressed for an amelioration of the worst features of cattle-ship and shambles, and, as a minimum, for the establishment of public abattoirs in place of private slaughterhouses. Even in this respect, owing to the supineness of the County Council, London has been left at the mercy of “the trade,” though in some other districts there has been a gratifying improvement. The Humanitarian League, enjoying the advantage of being advised by such experts as Sir Benjamin Richardson, Mr. H. F. Lester (whose _Behind the Scenes in Slaughterhouses_ we published in 1892), Mr. Charles W. Forward, Mr. C. Cash, and Mr. R. S. Ayling, lost no opportunity of making known the need of this long postponed reform; but the subject being so repulsive it was always difficult to enlist the sympathies of the public, that is, of the very persons whose conscience ought to have been touched; or, if any interest _was_ awakened, it might be among those who were traditionally or professionally opposed to the changes desired.

This danger was once curiously illustrated at a meeting held by the League in the rooms of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, when Mr. John Colam, the Secretary of that Society, took the chair, and Mr. C. W. Forward gave an address on the Jewish method of slaughtering. A mere handful of our friends attended, but the hall was packed from end to end with Jewish visitors, who had seen the announcement of the meeting in the papers, and rallied to the defence of their ritual. We had intended to move a resolution, strongly condemning the Jewish system, but we decided, after a hurried consultation with Mr. Colam, that an academic discussion would better suit the circumstances; and fortunately it did not occur to our Hebrew friends to propose and pass a resolution of the contrary kind: they talked long and volubly, and we were glad they did nothing worse. The meeting, however, was not without result, for it led, a couple of months later, to the reception by the Jewish Board of Shecheta of a deputation from the Humanitarian League, at which the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Adler, was present, and gave us a very courteous reply. The Jewish system of “casting,” he said, which had especially been criticized as barbarous, was a good deal misunderstood owing to the word by which it was described: in reality the animals were not “cast,” but “let down gently with ropes.” Mr. Forward, however, who had often witnessed the process, remained unconvinced on this point: it seemed to him that it was the public that was being let down gently with words.

The League had the satisfaction of seeing the Jewish system strongly condemned in the official report (1904) of the Committee appointed to consider the Humane Slaughtering of Animals; but nothing has yet been done to carry the recommendations of that Committee into effect, the supposed sanctity of a “religious” usage having been allowed, as usual, to outweigh the clearest dictates of humaneness.

There are not a few other current and strongly-rooted practices to which the title of this chapter might justly be applied; but enough has now been said to show that the merry month of May, in the year of grace 1640, did not witness, as has been supposed, quite the last instance of the infliction of Torture in this favoured land of the free.

XI

HUNNISH SPORTS AND FASHIONS

Half ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.
KEATS.

From the subject of torture we pass naturally to that of sport; indeed, it is difficult to separate them, for they are psychologically and actually akin. There is undoubtedly an element of sport in the gloating over savage punishments, and some of the sufferings which sportsmen inflict, such as the hunting to death of a timid deer or hare, cannot fairly be distinguished from torture. But when I speak of “sport” in this connection, I mean of course _blood-sport_; not the manly games of playing-field or river, but the quest for personal recreation at the expense of pain to others. The term “blood-sports” was first used, as far as I am aware, by Mr. John Macdonald, who, under the name of “Meliorist,” was the author of some suggestive articles that appeared in the _Echo_; anyhow, the Humanitarian League borrowed the word from him, and finding that it “went home,” made a point of using it on every possible occasion. It is the right and proper expression for the practices which it connotes.

The League published in 1914 a volume of essays on _Killing for Sport_, with Preface by Mr. Bernard Shaw, in which the various aspects of blood-sports were for the first time fully set forth and examined from the standpoint of ethics and economics: the book, in fact, formed a summary of the League’s arraignment of certain bloody and barbarous pastimes, just as _The Flogging Craze_ was a record of its protests against the continued use of the lash. I will here mention only a few of the more salient features of a long campaign.

For ten years, from 1891 to 1901, the League made the Royal Buckhounds serve as a “peg”--and a very useful peg it was--on which to hang an exposure of the cruelty of stag-hunting.[34] The doings of the Buckhounds were watched from season to season; detailed accounts of the “runs” were published, in contradiction of the shuffling reports sent to the papers by patrons of the Hunt, and a number of horrible cases of mutilation were dragged into light. Questions were put in Parliament; leaflets, articles, and press letters printed in hundreds, and many lectures given at various clubs and institutions.

In this work we had the sympathy of many distinguished public men and the support of a section of the press (notably of the _Star_, which was then edited by Mr. Ernest Parke); but every possible difficulty was put in our way by officials, whether of the Court, the Government, or the Hunt, who in this case, as in all, desired nothing more than to save themselves trouble by letting things go on as before. Red tape cared little whether carted stags continued to be disembowelled on iron palings and worried by hounds. For example, when, in 1898, we wished to lay before Queen Victoria the case _against_ the Royal Hunt, in answer to Lord Ribblesdale’s book, _The Queen’s Hounds_, her private secretary, Sir A. Bigge, refused to bring the League’s publications to her notice; the Home Secretary also declined to do so, and so did the Prime Minister, each and all of them cordially advising us to apply elsewhere. Thus thwarted, we hit on the expedient of _petitioning_ the Queen to allow the counter-case to be sent to her, and in this way the Home Office was finally forced to do what it had declared to be “contrary to practice.” The Queen, as we had known since 1891, from a private letter addressed to Mr. Stratton by Sir Henry Ponsonby, had been “strongly opposed to stag-hunting for many years past”; and when this fact was published after her death it settled the fate of the Buckhounds.

Looking back twenty years and more, it is comical to find the followers of the Royal Hunt trying to exploit the visit of the German Emperor, in 1899, in order to bolster up the failing reputation of their sport. They were very anxious that a “meet” of the Buckhounds should be one of the entertainments provided for the Kaiser, and on November 24th, in expectation of his being present, an unusually large company assembled; but the Humanitarian League had been beforehand in the matter, a letter of protest which it had addressed to the Prince of Wales had the desired effect, and the Kaiser had an engagement elsewhere. Had he been present, he would, as it happened, have seen a deer staked and done to death in the manner which was far from uncommon, and he would have learnt (if he had any doubt on the subject) that “Huns” are not entirely confined to Germany.

This rascally “sport,” though no longer a State institution, is still carried on by private packs in several parts of the country, and nothing but fresh legislation can prevent its continuance. A “Spurious Sports Bill” drafted by the Humanitarian League, with the purpose of prohibiting the hunting of carted stags, the coursing of bagged rabbits, and the shooting of birds released from traps, has been introduced at various times in the House of Commons by Mr. A. C. Morton, Mr. H. F. Luttrell, Sir William Byles, Sir George Greenwood, and other Members, and in the House of Lords by the Bishop of Hereford (Dr. Percival); but its opponents have always succeeded in preventing its becoming law. On one occasion (1893) it was “talked out” by Sir Frederick Banbury, who is renowned in the House as an anti-vivisectionist and friend of animals. It is not only human beings who have to pray, at times, to be delivered from their friends.

The Eton Beagles were another of the League’s most cherished “pegs,” and displayed as useful an illustration of the hare-hunt as the Royal Buckhounds of the deer-worry. Had humanitarians talked of the cruelty of hare-hunting in general, little attention would have been paid to them; but with concrete instances drawn from the leading public school, and quoted in the words of the boys themselves as printed in the _Eton College Chronicle_--a disgusting record of “blooded” hounds and of the hare “broken up,” or crawling “deadbeat,” “absolutely stiff,” “so done that she could not stand”--a great impression was made, and the memorials presented to the headmaster or the Governing Body, asking for the substitution of a drag-hunt (a form of sport which was formerly popular at Eton and led to very good runs), received a large number of very influential signatures, including that of the Visitor of Eton, the late Bishop of Lincoln, Dr. E. L. Hicks. But public opinion counts for very little at the school where ignorance is bliss; a far more important consideration for Governing Bodies and headmasters is the opinion of Old Etonians; indeed, it is doubtful whether a headmaster of Eton could even retain his position if he were to decree the discontinuance of what Dr. Warre described, with all due solemnity, as “an old Eton institution.” So obvious was this that we were inspired to borrow the title of Gray’s famous poem in an enlarged form, and to indite an “Ode on the Exceedingly Distant Prospect of Humane Reform at Eton College.”

Dr. E. C. Selwyn, headmaster of Uppingham, wrote to me if he were made headmaster of Eton, he would abolish the Beagles “at the earliest opportunity.” Unfortunately he was not the successful candidate for the post when Dr. Warre gave it up, or we might have seen some rare sport at Eton, and a hue and cry more exciting than any hare-hunt. Dislike of blood-sport as a school recreation is by no means confined to humanitarians, as may be seen from the following sentence which I quote from an interesting unpublished letter on the ethics of sport, addressed to Mr. Stratton in 1905 by Mr. F. C. Selous, the great lion-hunter: “After reading your pamphlet, I certainly think it would be better to substitute drag-hunting for the pursuit and killing of a hare. To see one of these animals worried and torn by a pack of dogs is not an edifying sight for a young boy.”

All hunting, whether of the hare, fox, stag, or otter, has many horrible features: perhaps the very nastiest is the custom of “blooding,” i.e. baptizing with the blood of the mangled victim any children or young folk who partake in the sport for the first time. The practice has been described, but too modestly, it would seem, as “a hunting tradition which goes back to the Middle Ages”; one would suppose it went back to still more primitive times. Yet to this day this savage ritual is patronized by our nobility and by royalty. “Prince Henry was blooded,” was the conclusion of a newspaper report of a “kill” with a pack of fox-hounds, January 9, 1920. There is a double significance, it seems, in the expression “a prince of the blood.”

“You can’t eliminate cruelty from sport,” says a distinguished sportsman, the Earl of Warwick, in his _Memories of Sixty Years_. In no form of blood-sport do we more clearly see what a veritable mania this amateur butchery may become than in one of Lord Warwick’s hobbies, “big game hunting,” the difficult and costly pursuit of wild animals in distant lands, for no better reason than the craze for killing. Tiger-shooting is doubtless an exciting pastime, and there are savage beasts that at times have to be destroyed; but what of that other tiger that lurks in the heart of each of us? and how is _he_ going to be eliminated, so long as a savage lust for killing is a recognized form of amusement? For in spite of all the barriers and divisions that prejudice and superstition have heaped up between the human and the non-human, we may take it as certain that, in the long run, as we treat out fellow-beings, “the animals,” so shall we treat our fellow-men.

Every one knows how the possessors of such “trophies” as the heads and horns of “big game” love to decorate their halls with these mementoes of the chase. I was once a visitor at a house which was not only adorned in this way, but contained also a human head that had been sent home by a member of a certain African expedition and “preserved” by the skill of the taxidermist. When I was invited by the owner of the head--the _second_ owner--to see that particular trophy, it was with some misgivings that I acquiesced; but when, after passing up a staircase between walls plastered with portions of the carcases of elephant, rhinoceros, antelope, etc., I came to a landing where, under a glass case, was the head of a pleasant-looking young negro, I felt no special repugnance at the sight. It was simply a part--and, as it seemed, not a peculiarly dreadful or loathsome part--of the surrounding dead-house; and I understood how mankind itself may be nothing more than “big game” to our soldier-sportsmen abroad. The absolute distinction between human and non-human is a fiction which will not bear the test either of searching thought in the study or of rough experience in the wilds.

Iniquitous as the Game Laws are, I have often thought it strange that Kingsley, even when regarding them, quite justly, from the poacher’s standpoint, should have hurled at the game-preserver that eloquent denunciation:

There’s blood on the game you sell, squire,
And there’s blood on the game you eat.

without in the least realizing the full truth of the statement. For there, literally, is blood on the “game” which the squire (or the poacher) disposes of, viz. the blood of the “game” itself; and that Kingsley should have forgotten this, is a singular proof of the way in which the lower animals are regarded as mere goods and chattels, and not as creatures of flesh and blood at all--except to cook and eat. The very use of the word “game,” in this sense, is most significant.

As mention has been made of the fall of the Royal Buckhounds, a few words must be said of the man who chiefly brought it about. The Rev. J. Stratton was Master of Lucas’s Hospital, Wokingham, a charitable institution founded in 1663, where a number of aged labourers live as pensioners; and as Wokingham lay in the centre of the hunting district, he was well placed for observing what went on, and for obtaining exact information: he had, moreover, a first-hand knowledge of “sport,” and his detestation of it was based on his own earlier experiences, as well as on a keen sense of fair play. Of all the active workers with whom I have been privileged to be associated, Mr. Stratton was the finest; I have known nothing more courageous than the way in which, almost single-handed at first, and with the whole hunting fraternity against him, he gradually “pulled down” (to use a pleasant sporting term) the cruel and stupid institution which was carried on in the Sovereign’s name and at the expense of the public.

In character, as in appearance, Mr. Stratton was a Roman; his stern and unswerving rectitude made him respected even by his most active opponents. His outspokenness, where matters of real import were at stake, was quite undaunted, and to an extent which sometimes caused consternation among the weaker brethren. I was once asked by a sympathetic bishop whether it would be possible “to keep Mr. Stratton quiet.” More than one dignitary of the Church must have mused on that problem; for if Mr. Stratton had a weakness, it was for a bishop. I do not mean that he viewed bishops with undue reverence, somewhat the reverse, for he loved to take a bishop to task; and some of his letters to bishops, in reference to their sanction of vivisection or blood-sports, were of a nature to cause a mild surprise in episcopal circles. But if bishops did not always appreciate Mr. Stratton, other persons did. So well did the birds in his garden at Wokingham understand him, that they would let him talk to them and stroke them as they sat on their nests. Could there be a more convincing proof of a man’s goodness?

Another active champion of the reform of blood-sports was Colonel W. L. B. Coulson, a well-known Northumberland country gentleman and J.P., who was one of the first men of influence to join the Humanitarian League. He possessed a fine military presence, and a voice which, even at its whisper, had a volume and resonance which could not fail to make it heard to the uttermost corner of a room; his appearance, in brief, had so little of the pale cast of thought that on the occasion when he first met us we were the victims of an odd misapprehension. It had been arranged that he would preside at a public meeting in London, the first we held, on the subject of deer-hunting; and when the members of our Committee arrived, some time before the discussion began, we were troubled to find thus early upon the scene a very large and powerfully built man, whom, as he did not introduce himself, we imagined to be a master of staghounds, or at least an opponent of formidable calibre, come to intimidate us at the start. We were relieved when we discovered him to be our missing chairman.

Colonel Coulson was very popular with his audiences, for there was a frankness about him which went straight to the heart, and his speeches, though not cultured, were full of raciness and humanity. Himself brought up as a sportsman, he felt keenly about the sufferings of animals, and after his retirement from the army devoted much time to lecturing-tours, in which he visited many parts of the country and especially addressed himself to schools. Eton would not receive him, doubtless fearing some reference to her hare-hunt; but at several of the other big public schools he was asked to speak more than once. Brave, simple, and courteous, he was loved by all who knew him, and by none more than by his colleagues in the humanitarian cause.

Nothing was more remarkable in the history of the Humanitarian League than the diversity of character in the persons whom its principles attracted. Lady Florence Dixie, who joined the League at its start in 1891, had a strange and adventurous career, and has been described, not inaptly, as “a sort of ‘Admirable Crichton’ among women, a poet, a novelist, an explorer, a war correspondent, a splendid horse-woman, a convincing platform-speaker, a swimmer of great endurance, and as keen a humanitarian as ever lived.” It was as humanitarian that I knew her; and she was certainly one of the most faithful supporters of the League, ever ready to help with pen or purse, and prompt, sincere, and unwavering in her friendship. Her poems, of which she sent me more than one volume, had little worth; but her essay on “The Horrors of Sport” was one of the most vivid and moving appeals that have been written on the subject; none of the League’s pamphlets had so wide a circulation, for it has been read and quoted in every part of the English-speaking world. She here wrote with full knowledge of the facts, and with a sympathetic insight, which, together with a swift and picturesque style, made her, at her best, a powerful and fascinating writer. Of her personal eccentricities many reports were rife; and I remembered that when I lived at Eton she used to be seen in the garden of her villa, on the Windsor bank of the Thames, walking, like a modern Circe, with a number of wild beasts in her train. On one occasion a jaguar made his escape from her control, and there was a mild panic in Windsor and Eton till he was recaptured: it might have indeed been serious if the bold youths who hunted the terror-stricken hare had started a quarry that showed fight.

Another unfailing friend of the League’s Sports Committee was the Hon. FitzRoy Stewart. When I first knew him he was Secretary of the Central Conservative Office, and we were rather surprised at finding an ally in that direction; in fact, we had some suspicions, entirely unjust, as the result proved, that Mr. Stewart might be desirous of learning our plan of campaign against the Royal Buckhounds in the interest of his sporting friends. The first time I visited him at the Conservative headquarters I was introduced to Sir Howard Vincent, M.P., who, though a patron of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had not scrupled to throw in his lot with those who were fighting for the continuance of rabbit-coursing, pigeon-shooting and stag-hunting. He seemed to be a good-natured, vacuous-minded person, and one of his remarks, I remember, was that England is “a paradise for animals.” This was hardly the opinion of FitzRoy Stewart, who was indefatigable with his schemes for the prohibition of the more cruel forms of sport. He had great hopes of young Mr. Winston Churchill, then beginning to be known as a rising star of the Tory party, and at his earnest request a letter was sent to Mr. Churchill from the office of the League, reminding him of Lord Randolph Churchill’s strong denunciation of stag-hunting, and asking his aid against the Buckhounds. Mr. Churchill, however, unmoved by this appeal to his filial piety, sagely opined that the crusade against the Royal Hunt was too democratic.

Mr. FitzRoy Stewart worked closely with the Humanitarian League till his death in 1914; and many were his press letters which he and I jointly composed at the office in Chancery Lane. He liked to come there armed with some sheets of his Carlton Club notepaper, on which the letters, when worded to his satisfaction, were duly copied and signed--“Old Harrovian,” or “A Member of the Carlton Club,” was his favourite signature--and then he sent them off to some influential editors of his acquaintance, whose disgust would have been unmeasured had they known what company their esteemed contributor had been keeping. Mr. Stewart, I must in fairness add, though a strong opponent of blood-sport, was a firm believer in the beneficence of flogging; but he was willing to sink this one point of difference in his general approval of the League’s work. So good-natured was he, that when the subject of corporal punishment was going to crop up at a Committee meeting, he used to ask me to put it first on the agenda, so that he might wait outside until that burning question was disposed of: then he would join us--coming in to dessert, as we expressed it--and take his share in the discussion. Oh, if all colleagues were as reasonable! As _The Times_ truly said of him, “his sweetness of temper and social tact made him the most companionable of human beings.”

Mr. John Colam, for many years Secretary of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was a well-known figure in the zoophilist movement at the time of which I am speaking, and had a great reputation for astuteness. Wily he certainly was, with the vast experience he had acquired in evading the double pressure of those who cried “forward” and of those who cried “back”; and he was a veritable Proteus in the skill with which he gave the slip to any one who tried to commit him to any course but the safest. He used privately to allege the backwardness of his Committee as a cause for this seeming timidity; thus he told me in 1901, when the fate of the Royal Buckhounds was hanging in the balance, that the R.S.P.C.A. was unable to take any public action, not from any remissness on his part, but because certain members of the Committee were afraid of alienating subscribers, including King Edward himself. Personally I liked Mr. Colam; he was humane so far as his interests permitted, and when one had realized, once for all, the uselessness of attempting to bind him to any fixed purpose, it was instructive to have an occasional talk with him at Jermyn Street, and to observe the great adroitness with which he conducted the affairs of the Society; and he, on his part, when he saw that one had no longer any ethical designs on him, but approached him rather as a fellow-student, albeit a mere amateur, in the art of dealing with unreasonable people, would become chatty and confidential and tell amusing stories of a Secretary’s adventures. He would have made a successful Prime Minister, for his “wizardry” was of the highest order; as a humanitarian he left something to be desired.

With the Sporting League, which professed to discountenance “malpractices” in sport, yet opposed the Bill which would have prohibited rabbit-coursing and kindred pastimes, we were of course involved in controversy. We sought to bring this to a point by proposing a public discussion of the question: “What are malpractices in Sport?” But this challenge was declined, the _Sportsman_ expressing the opinion that “such piffling folly is best treated with contempt,” and the _Evening News_ that “cackling is the strong point of the faddists.” We were more successful in bringing to book some champions of aristocratic blood-sports, among them Sir Herbert Maxwell and Sir Edward Grey, who on one or two occasions appeared on neutral platforms, and seized the opportunity to eulogize their own favourite recreations, but showed little relish for the discussion which they themselves had provoked. Mr. F. G. Aflalo was another of our many antagonists in the magazines and the press; and I have a pleasant recollection of friendly encounters with him in the _Fortnightly Review_ and elsewhere. Many other apologists of blood-sports there were, of a more sentimental and unreasoning kind, and with these, too, we much enjoyed the argument, which was quite as good sport to us as their hunting or coursing was to them.

Before passing from Sports to Fashions, I will speak briefly of those popular places of recreation, known euphemistically as “Zoological Gardens,” which in a civilized age would surely be execrated as among the saddest and dullest spots on the earth, being, in fact, nothing cheerier than big convict-stations, to which the ill-fated life-prisoners--“stuff,” as the keepers call them--are conveyed from many distant lands. How any rational person can find pleasure in seeing, for example, “the lions fed” (the modern version of _Christianos ad leones_) is a mystery that baffles thought. I have not been to the London “Zoo” for a good many years; but when I knew it, the incongruities of the place were so ludicrous as almost to obscure one’s sense of its barbarity: the Tiger’s den, for instance, was labelled: “Beware of pickpockets,” and the Eagle’s cage bore the inscription: “To the Refreshment Rooms”; and there, sure enough, within sight of the captive Bird of Jove moping disconsolate on his perch, was a waiter, serving out coffees or lemon-squashes, regardless of the great Raptor by whom his predecessor, Ganymede, had been carried off to be the god’s cup-bearer. Could bathos have gone further?

A friend of mine who, as an Eton boy, used to go to the “Zoo” in the holidays and amuse himself by teasing the captives, was converted to humanitarian principles in a rather curious way. An elk, or some large animal of the ruminant order, whose wrath he had deservedly incurred, _coughed_ on him with such vehemence that he retired from the elk-house covered with a sort of moist bran, and with his top-hat irrevocably damaged. Though at the time this touched his hat rather than his heart, he afterwards came to regard the incident as what is called a “means of grace.” It caused _him_, too, to “ruminate,” and so brought home to him the fact that an elk is “a person.”

A pamphlet of mine, issued by the Humanitarian League in 1895, entitled “A Zoophilist at the Zoo,” was the beginning of an agitation which gradually led to a considerable improvement in the housing of the animals, in which discussion the most noteworthy feature was a series of articles contributed to the _Saturday Review_ by Mr. Edmund Selous, and afterwards reprinted by the League. Another subject, debated with much liveliness, was the practice of feeding pythons and other large serpents on living prey--ducks, fowls, rabbits, and even goats being given to the reptiles, to be devoured in a manner which was sickening to witness and almost too loathsome to describe.[35] These exhibitions were open till 1881; then for publicity extreme secrecy was substituted, and all inquiries were met by the stereotyped statement that the use of live prey was confined to cases “where such food was a necessity.”

Who feeds slim serpents must himself be slim.

The League found the reptile-feeders at Regent’s Park exceedingly slippery to deal with, and it needed long time, and much patience, to bring them to book. In this task, however, I was encouraged by the recollection of a scene which I once witnessed in a crowded railway-carriage, when a large eel had made its escape from a basket which one of my fellow-travellers was holding, and created a mild panic among the company by its convolutions under the seat. An old lady sharply upbraided the owner of the eel, and I was struck by the reasonableness of his reply in rather difficult circumstances, when the eel had repeatedly slipped from his grasp. “Wait a little, mum,” he said, “until he gets a bit dusty”; and the result proved the man to be right. In like manner we waited till the excuses given by the Zoological Society had become very dusty indeed.

Some of the reasons offered for the old system of snake-feeding were themselves truly reptilian. “We follow God’s ordinances, and they must be right,” was the reverent remark of a keeper; and humanitarians were told that “to declare the use of live food to be cruel is to bring that charge against the Designer of Nature Himself.” So deep and fervent was the piety of the Reptile House! Nevertheless, we continued to urge our point, and the subject was hotly debated at more than one of the Zoological Society’s annual meetings, where, as a result of the protests raised by Captain Alfred Carpenter, R.N., Mr. Stephen Coleridge, Mr. Rowland Hunt, and other F.Z.S.’s, it was made evident that the majority of the Fellows, who regarded the Society as a sort of private club, were indignant at public opinion being brought to bear upon their concerns. It was a situation not devoid of humour. I happen to know that in the course of an excited meeting held in November, 1907, when the Duke of Bedford, as President of the Zoological Society, was in the chair, the following telegram was despatched to his Grace:

Beg you to stand firm for live food and maintain the ordinances of
the Creator.

_From_ ANNA CONDA.

This artless prayer of an unknown lady was fully in accord with the spirit of the meeting. Nevertheless, things moved, even in Regent’s Park; and, when we had shown that the snakes in the New York Zoological Park were successfully fed on freshly-killed animals, we had the satisfaction of seeing the same less barbarous method adopted at the London “Zoo.”

I once had the advantage of hearing some of the inner history of a large menagerie from the wife of one of the keepers, a charwoman in the house where I was staying, who was of a somewhat loquacious and communicative disposition, the staple of her talk being the adventures of her husband, Johnnie. “Johnnie came home dead-tired last night, sir,” she said on one occasion. “Why was that, Mrs. Smith?” I asked. “Why, sir, he had had to beat the elephant; and after that he was too stiff and tired to take his supper.” My natural inquiry whether the elephant had been able to take _his_ supper was set aside as frivolous.

Knowing something of the profound piety of the keepers at the (London) “Zoo” in relation to snake-feeding, I was pained to learn from this good woman that her husband, who, unfortunately, was not employed in a reptile-department, had “lost his faith,” and for a reason which I think has not before been recorded among the many modern causes of unbelief. “You see, sir, Johnny can never again hold with the Church, after the way he’s seen clergymen going on with girls in the elephant house.”

When speaking of cruel pastimes, I referred to the value of the term “blood-sports” in the many controversies which we waged. Just as the fortunes of a book may be affected by its title, so in ethical and political discussions there is often what may be called a winning word; and where none such is found ready to hand, it is advisable to invent one. Thus the League made good play with “flagellomania,” as used by Mr. Bernard Shaw in one of his lectures; and “brutalitarian” (an invention of our own, I think) did us yeoman service, as will be seen in a later chapter. “Murderous Millinery,” another term which has gained a wide circulation, was first used as a chapter-heading in my _Animals’ Rights_; and though it rather shocked some zoophilists of the older school, who presumably thought that only a human being can be “murdered,” it served a useful purpose, perhaps, in drawing attention to the revolting cruelty that underlies the plumage trade. In its condemnation of these barbarities, as in other matters, the Humanitarian League was a pioneer; its pamphlet on “The Extermination of Birds,” written by Miss Edith Carrington, and published nearly thirty years ago, played a marked part in the creation of a better public opinion; and a Bill drafted by the League in 1901, to prohibit the use of the plumage of certain rare and beautiful birds, attracted very wide public attention, and was the basis of subsequent attempts at legislation. But here it must be added that the man who has done more than all the Societies together to insure the passage of a Plumage Bill is Mr. James Buckland. Nothing in the humanitarian movement has been finer than the way in which Mr. Buckland forced this question to the front and made it peculiarly his own.

Every whit as savage as the feather-trade is the fur-trade, responsible as it is for some most horrible methods of torture--the steel-trap, which inflicts shocking injuries on its victim; the spring-pole, which jerks both trap and captive high in air, there to hang till the trapper next comes on his rounds; the terrible “dead-fall” used for bears and other large animals; the poisoning of wolves with strychnine; and the abominations in the butchery of seals. Even the fashionable people who wear furs (in a climate where there is not the least need of such clothing) would hardly be able to continue the habit if they knew how their “comforts” were provided; as it is, the Feather-Headed Woman is not a commoner sight in our streets than the Ass in the skin of the (Sea) Lion. It would seem that fur-wearers are almost unconscious that their sables and sealskins are the relicts of previous possessors, and, like the heroines of modern drama, have very decidedly had “a past”; or, if they do not wholly forget this fact, they think it quite natural that _they_ should now have their turn with the skin, as the animal had before. Thus Pope, in a well-known couplet:

Know, Nature’s children all divide her care;
The fur that warms a monarch warmed a bear.

One would have thought that the bear who grew the skin had somewhat more right to it than the monarch! Politicians may talk of “one man, one vote”; but really, if there is ever to be a civilized state, a programme of “one man, one skin” seems fairer and more democratic.

XII

A FADDIST’S DIVERSIONS

No greyhound loves to cote a hare, as I to turn and course a
fool.--SCOTT’S _Kenilworth_.

I wonder how many times, during the past thirty years, we humanitarians were told that we were “faddists,” or “cranks,” or “sentimentalists,” that our hearts were “better than our heads,” and that we were totally lacking in a sense of humour. I feel sure that if I had kept all the letters and press-cuttings in which we found ourselves thus described, they would amount not to hundreds but to thousands; for it seemed to be a common belief among the genial folk whose unpleasant practices were arraigned by us that the Committee of the Humanitarian League must be a set of sour Puritans, sitting in joyless conclave, and making solemn lamentation over the wickedness of the world. Our opponents little knew how much we were indebted to them for providing a light and comic side in a controversy which might otherwise have been just a trifle dull.

It was said by Gibbon, that it was the privilege of the medieval church “to defend nonsense by cruelties.” Nowadays we see the patrons of sport, vivisection, butchery, and other time-honoured institutions, adopting the contrary process, and defending cruelties by nonsense. And by _what_ nonsense! I do not know where else one can find such grotesque absurdities, such utter topsy-turvydom of argument, as in the quibbling modern brutality which gives sophisticated reasons for perpetuating savage customs.

Of some of the fallacies of the cannibalistic conscience I have already spoken: a volume could easily be filled with not less diverting utterances culled from kindred fields of thought. The apologists of the Royal Buckhounds, for instance, were comedians of the first rank, a troupe of entertainers who long ago anticipated “The Follies.” Did they not themselves assure us that, in hunting the carted stag, they “rode to save the deer for another day”? Such devotion needed another Lovelace:

Did’st wonder, since my love was such,
I hunted thee so sore?
I could not love thee, Deer, so much,
Loved I not Hunting more.

The stag, so a noble lord pointed out at a meeting of the Sporting League, was “a most pampered animal.” “When he was going to be hunted, he was carried to the meet in a comfortable cart. When set down, the first thing he did was to crop the grass. When the hounds got too near, they were stopped. By and by he lay down, and was wheeled back to his comfortable home. It was a life many would like to live.” Thus it was shown to be a deprivation, to humans and non-humans alike, not to be hunted by a pack of staghounds over a country of barbed wire and broken bottles. Life seemed poor and mean without it.

Fox-hunting, too, has always been refreshingly rich in sophistries. The farmer is adjured to be grateful to the Hunt, because the fox is killed, and the fox because his species (not himself) is “preserved”$1 thus the sportsman takes credit either way--on the one hand, for the destruction of a pest; on the other, for saving similar pests from extermination. It is a scene for a Gilbertian opera or a “Bab Ballad”; it makes one feel that this British blood-sport must be deleterious not only to the victims of the chase, but to the mental capacity of the gentlemen who indulge in it.

The climax of absurdity was reached, perhaps, in the dedication by the Archbishop of York (Dr. Cosmo Lang) of a stained window--a _very_ stained window, as was remarked at the time--in the church of Moor Monkton, to the memory of the Rev. Charles Slingsby, an aged blood-sportsman who broke his neck in the hunting-field. That a minister should have been “launched into eternity,” as the phrase is, while chasing a fox, might have been expected to cause a sense of deep pain, if not shame, to his co-religionists: what happened was that an Archbishop was found willing to eulogize, in a consecrated place of worship, not only the old gentleman whose life was thus thrown away, but the sport of fox-hunting itself: Dr. Lang pronounced, in fact, what may be called the Foxology. Of the stained window, with its representation, on one part, of St. Hubert and the stag, and on the other of St. Francis--yes, St. Francis--giving his blessing to the birds, one can only think with a smile. A few months later, an Izaak Walton memorial window was placed in Winchester Cathedral in honour of “the quaint old cruel coxcomb” whom Byron satirized. Whether, in this work of religious art, the pious angler is portrayed in the act of impaling the live frog on the hook “as if he loved him,” the newspapers did not state.

Many instances might be quoted of the deep godliness, at times even religious rapture, felt by the votaries of blood-sports; perhaps one from the German Crown Prince’s _Leaves from my Hunting Diary_ is most impressive: “To speak of religious feelings is a difficult matter. I only know one thing--I have never felt so near my God as when I, with my rifle on my knee, sat in the golden loneliness of high mountains, or in the moving silence of the evening forest.” This sort of sentiment is by no means exclusively of German make. Listen to the piety of a big game-hunter, Mr. H. W. Seton-Karr: “Why did Almighty God create lions to prey on harmless animals? And should we not, even at the expense of a donkey as bait, be justified in reducing their number?” Here, again, is what the Rev. Walter Crick had to say in defence of the fur-trade: “If it is wrong to carry a sealskin muff, the camel’s-hair raiment of St. John Baptist, to say nothing of the garments worn by our first parents in the Garden of Eden, stands equally condemned.”

Strictly ecclesiastical was the tone of a pamphlet which hailed from New York State, entitled “The Dog Question, discussed in the Interest of Humanity,” and concluded in these terms: “Now, my boy or girl, whichever you are, drop this nonsense about dogs. They are demanding valuable time that should be employed in teaching such as you. A dog cannot love you. You cannot love a dog. Naught beside a divine soul can love or be loved. Chloroform your dog, and take to reading your Testament.”

I once overheard a clergyman, who had taken his seat at a tea-table in a Surrey garden, sharply call to order some boys of his party who were striking wildly at wasps and mashing them with any instrument that was handy. I listened, thinking that at last I was going to hear some wise words on that silly and disgusting practice in which many excitable persons indulge; but it turned out that the cause of the reverend gentleman’s displeasure was merely that he had not yet “said grace”: that done, the wasp-mashing was resumed without interruption.

Space would fail me, were I to attempt to cite one-hundredth part of the amazing Book of Fallacies written in defence of Brutality. “Methinks,” said Sir Herbert Maxwell, “were it possible to apply the referendum to our flocks and herds, the reply would come in a fashion on which vegetarians scarcely calculate.” There would be a universal roar of remonstrance, it seems, from oxen, sheep, and swine, at the proposal to sever their grateful association with the drover and the slaughterman. Even more delightful was Mr. W. T. Stead, when he received from the spirit world a message to the effect that vegetarianism was good for some persons but not good for _him_. That message, I think, smacked less of the starry spheres than of the _Review of Reviews_ office: if it was not pure spirit, it was pure Stead.

The “mystics” were often a great joy to us; for example, Mr. J. W. Lloyd, author of an occult work called _Dawn-Thought_, expressed himself as follows: “When I go afield with my gun, and kill my little brother, the Rabbit, I do not therefore cease to love him, or deny my relationship, or do him any real wrong. I simply set him free to come one step nearer to me.” Here was Brer Fox again, only funnier. We suggested to Mr. Lloyd that “Brawn-Thought” might be a more appropriate title for his book.

Thus, like pedagogues, we faddists, too, had our diversions; cheered as we were in the weary work of propaganda by such mental harlequinades as those of which I have quoted a few specimens almost at random.

Perhaps the most laughable thing about the poor spavined Fallacies was the entire confidence with which they were trotted out. They were very old and very silly; they had again and again been refuted; yet they were always advanced in a manner which seemed to say: “Surely _this_ is an argument you have never heard before? Surely you will give up your humanitarian sentiment _now_?” As the frequent oral exposure of such inveterate sophisms was a tedious task, we found it convenient to print them, tabulated and numbered, each with its proper refutation, under some such title as “Familiar Fallacies,” or, borrowing from Sydney Smith, “The Noodle’s Oration”; and then, when some opponent came along exultingly with one or other of them, all we had to do was to send him the list, with a mark against his own delusion. Trust one who has tried the plan: it is more effective than any amount of personal talk. The man who will bore you to death with his pertinacious twaddle, in the belief that he is saying something new, will soon tire of it when he finds the whole story already in print, with a “See number--” written large in blue pencil against his most original argument.

But the League did not stop at that point: we felt ourselves competent, after years of experience, to carry the war into the enemies’ camp--to hoist them with their own petard by means of the _reductio ad absurdum_, a pretended defence of the very practices which we were attacking. The publication of the first and only number of _The Brutalitarian, a Journal for the Sane and Strong_, went far towards achieving our aims. The printers were inundated with requests for copies, and the editor (as I happen to know) received many letters of warm congratulation on his efforts “to combat the sickly sentiments of modern times.” The press, as a whole, regarded the new paper with amusement tempered with caution: some suspecting in it the hand of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, some of Mr. Bernard Shaw, while one venturesome editor hinted that the humanitarians themselves might have been concerned in it, but prudently added that “perhaps that would be attributing too much cleverness to the Humanitarian League.” So the authorship of the _Brutalitarian_, like that of the letters of Junius, remained a secret; but the laughter caused by its preposterous eulogies of Flogging put a stop for the time to the cry that had been raised in _Blackwood_ by Mr. G. W. Steevens and others, that “we have let Brutality die out too much.” They did not relish their own panacea, when it was served to them in an undiluted form, and with imbecility no less than brutality as its principal ingredient.

The Eton Beagles, of course, offered a tempting mark for satire, as it was easy to hit upon a strain of balderdash, in mock defence of hare-hunting, the absurdity of which would be apparent to the ordinary reader, yet would escape the limited intelligence of schoolboys and sporting papers. Accordingly, there appeared in 1907, two numbers of _The Beagler Boy_, conducted by two Old Etonians with the professed purpose of “saving a gallant school sport from extinction,” and with the ulterior design of showing that there is nothing too fatuous to be seriously accepted as argument by the upholders of blood-sports.

The success of the _Beagler Boy_ in this adventure was not for a moment in doubt. The Etonians were enthusiastic over it. The _Sportsman_ found it “a publication after our own heart,” and “far more interesting and invigorating than anything we are capable of”; and the hoax was welcomed in like manner by _Sporting Life_, _Horse and Hound_, and the _Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News_, a periodical described (by itself) as “bright, entertaining, and original.” One of the most solemnly comic notices was that in _Countryside_, Mr. E. Kay Robinson’s paper, which found the _Beagler Boy_ “clever and strenuous, but of course _ex parte_”; but the gem of the collection was a long and serious dissertation on “Boys and Beagles” in the _British Medical Journal_, which thought that its readers would be glad to have their attention directed to the new sporting organ. There was a _sauve qui peut_ among these worthy people when, from the general laughter in the press, they learnt that they had been imposed upon; but the shock was borne most good-humouredly. “Even the beagler boys,” as was remarked by the _Evening Standard_, “those of them, at least, who know how rare and precious an instrument satire is, may forgive, after they have read: perhaps some will even be converted.” Their disillusionment must certainly have been rather keenly felt at the time; like that of the lion who, as related in _The Man-Eaters of Tsavo_, had carried off what he thought was a coolie from the tent, only to find, when he had gone some distance, that it was a sack of sawdust.

The _Beagler Boy_ was added, by request, to Lord Harcourt’s collection of books, pamphlets, and other matter relating to Eton, which at a later date he presented to the School. It must, I feel sure, be gratifying to Sir George Greenwood, and to the other Old Etonian who collaborated with him in the editorship, to know that the fruits of their toil are thus enshrined in the archives of Eton College.