Chapter VII: Part 7

Some twelve months after the meteoric career of the _Beagler Boy_ it happened that there was a good deal of talk about an Eton Mission to China, which was to give the Chinese “an opportunity of the best education and of learning Christianity.” Then a very curious thing happened. A Chinese gentleman, Mr. Ching Ping, who was in England at the time, wrote to Dr. Lyttelton, the headmaster, and offered to conduct a Chinese Mission to Eton, in order to bring “a message of humanity and civilization to your young barbarians of the West.” The proposal was not accepted, and it was even hinted in the press that Mr. Ching Ping came from this side of Suez; but however that may have been, his letter to Dr. Lyttelton had a wide circulation, both in England and in the Far East.

Such were some of a faddist’s diversions; others too we had, of a different kind, for the every-day work that goes on behind the scenes in an office is by no means devoid of entertainment to one who is interested in the eccentricities of human nature, and is prepared to risk some wasted hours in studying them. There was a time when I went to the headquarters of the Humanitarian League in Chancery Lane almost daily for some years, and there had experience of many strange visitors and correspondents of every complexion--voluble cranks and genial impostors; swindlers begging for the cost of a railway-ticket to their distant and long-lamented homes; ex-convicts proposing to write their prison-story at the League’s expense; needy journalists anxious to pick up a paragraph; litigants who wanted gratuitous legal advice; and, worst of all, the confidential Bores who were determined to talk to one for hours together about what Mr. Stead used to call “the progress of the world.”

Nor did the post often fail to bring me some queer tidings--a letter perhaps, from some zealot who sent his latest pamphlet about “God’s Dumb Animals” (himself, alas! not one of them), with a request that it should be at once forwarded to the Pope; a voluminous work in manuscript, propounding, as its author assured me, “opinions of an extraordinary and undreamt of kind”; an anthology of Bible-texts in praise of some disputed practice; a suggestion that a notorious murderer should be flogged before being hanged; a grave remonstrance from a friend who feared that public abattoirs “would pave the way for Socialism”; a request from a very troublesome correspondent that the League would award a medal to a man who had saved her from drowning; two twenty-page epistles from an American lady, who, in the first, complimented me on my “markedly intelligent view of the universe,” and in the second told me frankly that I was a fool; a note inviting me to call at a certain address, to fetch a cat whom the writer wished me to destroy; and an urgent inquiry whether sea-sand was a healthy bedding for pigs. Such communications were the daily reward of those who sat in offices to promote humanitarian principles. It was remarkable how few persons volunteered for the work.

Even arbitration, of a most delicate and thankless sort, was thrust upon us. My opinion was once asked on a point of manners, by a young man who was a member of the Humanitarian League. He had never been in the habit of doffing his hat to ladies; he hardly knew how to do so; yet having come to London from Arcadia he found himself upbraided for not making the customary obeisance to the wife of his employer. What was he to do? I gave him what I thought was the tactful advice, that he should so far make compromise as to raise his hat slightly, eschewing flourishes. A fortnight later he returned in reproachful mood, with the news that my too slender regard for principle had had a disastrous result. He had met the lady on the steps of some underground station, and in his attempt to bow to her, had dropped his hat in the stream of outgoing passengers, where it had been trampled underfoot.

All this was well enough for an amateur like myself who could withdraw when it became unbearable; but it made me understand why the official secretaries of propagandist societies often acquire a sort of defensive astuteness which is wrongly ascribed to some inborn cunning in their character. To do reform work in an office open at certain hours, is like being exposed as a live-bait where one may be nibbled at by every prowling denizen of the deep, or, to speak more accurately, of the shallows; and it is no exaggeration to say that the secretarial work of a cause is hindered much less by its avowed enemies than by its professed friends. Among zoophilists, especially, there are a number of good people, ladies, who go about talking of their “mercy-work,” yet show a merciless indifference to the value of other persons’ time. Here, incidentally, I may say that one of the most considerate visitors whom I ever saw at the office of the Humanitarian League was Mr. G. K. Chesterton, who repeatedly expressed his fears that, if he occupied much of my time, our friends the animals might be the sufferers. “Can you assure me,” he said, “that, if I stay a few minutes longer, no elephant will be the worse for it?”

By far the most deadly consumer of humanitarian energies is the benevolent Bore. There was a very good and worthy old gentleman who used to pay me frequent visits, the reason of which I did not discover till many years later; on several occasions he brought with him a written list of questions to be put to me, twelve or more perhaps in number, the only one of which I still remember was the not very thrilling inquiry: “Now, Sir, do you read the _Echo_?” In particular he pressed on my attention, as demanding most earnest study, a book called _The Alpha_, written by a friend of his, and differing, as he explained to me, from all other printed works in this--that whereas _they_ expressed merely the opinions of their respective writers, _The Alpha_ conveyed the actual and absolute truth. In my liking and respect for a sincere friend of our cause, I not only replied as well as I could to his string of questions, but even made an attempt to read _The Alpha_ itself: here, however (as with _The Works of Henry Heavisides_ mentioned in a previous chapter), I failed so utterly that all I could do was to agree with the donor of the book that it was certainly unique. This was too ambiguous to satisfy him; he was disappointed in me, and from that time his visits were fewer, till they altogether ceased: thus _The Alpha_ became in a manner the Omega or the end of our intercourse. After his death I learnt that he had left money to found a Society; and then only did I comprehend why he had “sampled” the Humanitarian League with such assiduous care. Without knowing it, we had been weighed in the balance and found wanting: we were not capable of so great and sacred a trust.

Sometimes the visitation came from oversea; in one case we unwittingly brought it on ourselves, by sending to the Madrid papers an account of a scandalous scene that had taken place with the Royal Buckhounds, our object being to show that British deer-hunting and Spanish bull-baiting came of the same stock. We did not know with what zest the Spanish papers had taken to the subject, till one day there arrived in Chancery Lane an infuriated American, who told us that his work in the Canary Islands had been blasted and ruined by our action. For years, he said, he had preached kindness to animals, making England his exemplar, and now at one fell swoop all his labours had been demolished, for the story of the British stag-bait had gone like wild-fire through the Spanish papers, and thence to the Canaries. We expressed our sincere regret to him for this mishap, but tried to make him see that it was no fault of ours if he had based his propaganda on a false principle, viz. the superiority of Anglo-Saxon ethics, instead of on the universal obligation of humaneness. It was useless. He consumed much time in excited talk, and went away unappeased. This incident should be classed, I feel, not with our diversions, but with our tribulations; but having no chapter on the latter theme, I must let it remain where it stands.

But here some of my readers may be wondering why the office of the Humanitarian League should have been so open to attack: they imagine it perhaps as a luxurious suite of apartments, one within the other, with a hall-porter in the outer premises, skilled in the art of the sending the undesirable visitor into space. In reality, the circumstances of the League were very humble, and its housing was in accord with its income; some of our friends, in fact, used to be pleased to chaff us by quoting that well-known verse in Lowell’s stanzas to Lloyd Garrison:

In a small chamber, friendless and unseen,
Toiled o’er his types one poor unlearn’d young man;
The place was dark, unfurnitured and mean;
Yet there the freedom of a race began.

Thus it was that, with an ante-room of very diminutive size, we were almost at the mercy of any one who opened the outer door; for though the secretary of the League, Miss Whitaker, would rush forward most devotedly to bear the brunt of the charge, not a few of our assailants were through the front lines, and well in our midst, before we were aware of it. To this I owe my not inconsiderable knowledge of the time-devouring Bore.

Among the ex-prisoners who visited us were occasionally some very good fellows, with a real wish to do something to improve the penal system, which they all described as thoroughly bad; but as a rule they lacked the power of expressing what they knew, or were hampered by some personal ailment. There was one, a quiet civil man, who was anxious to give a lecture before the League, and assured us that, though he was prone to drink, he would take care that none of his lapses should coincide with the date of his appearance on our platform. That was a risk which we were not disposed to take; but strange to say, the very disaster which we shunned in this case actually befell us, a year or two afterwards, at a most respectable meeting which we organized jointly with another Society. On the very stroke of the clock, when the audience was all seated in expectation, and the chairman was ready to ascend the platform, supported by the members of our Committee, the news reached us that the lecturer himself could not be present: it was _he_ in fact, who was having to be “supported,” in another and more literal sense.

Ex-warders did not often favour us with a visit; but one there was who had been employed in Reading Gaol at the time when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned there: such was his story, and I had no reason to disbelieve it. He told me several edifying anecdotes, among them the following: It used to be a great hardship to Wilde that the glazed window of his cell allowed him no skyward view (one recalls his allusion, in _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, to “that little tent of blue, which prisoners call the sky”); and once, when the prison chaplain was visiting him, he spoke sorrowfully of this grievance. But the chaplain only offered him spiritual comfort, and urged him to lift up his thoughts “to Him who is above the sky”; whereat Wilde, suddenly losing his patience, exclaimed, “Get out, you d----d fool!” and pushed him to the door. For this he was reported to the Governor.

The League had not often the honour of finding itself in agreement with the Prison Commissioners; but we did think that they were wise to decline the too generous offer of a body calling itself the Poetry Recital Society to read poetry to prisoners. The words, “I was in prison, and ye came unto me,” would receive a new and fearful significance, if a number of versifiers and reciters were to be let loose on the helpless inmates of our gaols. It seemed barbarous on the part of these minstrels to try to secure an audience which had no choice in the matter, and which had not got even an open window to jump through if the strain should have become too acute.

Of beggars and swindlers we had no lack in Chancery Lane; it suited their purpose to regard a Humanitarian League as primarily designed for the relief of the impecunious; its very name, they felt, could imply nothing less. They were mostly young men who seemed to act in concert; for they usually came, as if on circuit, at certain times of the year. Their mentality was of a low order (or they thought that ours was), for though they showed a certain ingenuity in collecting previous information about the parties on whom they tried to impose, they often presented their case so badly as to make it palpably absurd. Sometimes, however, a really clever and humorous rogue would make his appearance. There was one such who began a wordy statement that if I would but grant him twenty minutes, he could convince me that he was deserving of half a crown; but when I hinted that if the interview was going to cost me half a crown, I would rather be spared the twenty minutes, his solemnity fell from him like a cloud, and with a twinkling eye he said that he would be only too pleased to cut his story as short as I liked.

When I was a master at Eton I used to subscribe to the Charity Organization Society, and I was presented by that austere body with a number of tickets, one of which was to be given to every beggar who called; but the trouble was that the tramps declined to regard the “scrap of paper” seriously, and informed us, in effect, that when they asked for bread we were offering them a stone. It certainly did not seem quite a human way of treating a fellow-being; unless one could hold the comfortable belief, confidently expressed to me by one of my Eton colleagues, a very religious man, that every mendicant one meets has had a good chance in life, and has deliberately thrown it away. The logic of that view was to say “no” to everybody.

I once had an opportunity of seeing the exactly opposite theory put into practice. When I was living in Surrey, I had a visit from Prince Kropotkin, who was looking for a house in the district, and we spent a day in walking about on that quest. We met a troop of beggars whose appearance was decidedly professional; and I noticed that Kropotkin at once responded to their appeal. Later in the day we fell in with the same party, and again, when they told their tale of woe, Kropotkin put his hand in his pocket. At this I ventured to ask him whether he had observed that they were the same lot; to which he replied: “Oh, yes. I know they are probably impostors and will drink the money at the public house; but _we_ are going back to our comfortable tea, and I cannot run the risk of refusing help where it may possibly be needed.” If in this matter one sympathizes with Kropotkin rather than with the Charity Organization folk, I suppose it is on Shelley’s principle--that he would “rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than be saved with Paley and Malthus.”

I will conclude this chapter on our diversions with a rather diverting passage from Mr. George Moore’s _Confessions_:

“Self, and after self, a friend; the rest may go to the devil; and
be sure that when any man is more stupidly vain and outrageously
egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his hideousness in
humanitarianism.... Humanitarianism is a pigsty where liars,
hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate; it has been so
since the great Jew conceived it, and it will be so till the end.
Far better the blithe modern pagan in his white tie and evening
clothes, and his facile philosophy. He says: ‘I don’t care how the
poor live; my only regret is that they live at all’; and he gives
the beggar a shilling.”

Many years ago, at a meeting of the Shelley Society, I had the pleasure of a talk with Mr. George Moore; and I remember that when he asked me what work I was doing, and I said it was mostly humanitarian, there came over his expressive face a look of half-incredulous surprise and disgust--the sort of look a bishop might give to one who coolly remarked that he had just committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. I was rather puzzled at the moment; and it was not till long after, when I read Mr. Moore’s _Confessions_, that I realized of what crimes I had convicted myself in his eyes by my too careless avowal. But as for “the blithe modern pagan,” I suspect he would be a little less blithe if his wish were fulfilled, and the poor did not live at all; for how then would he obtain his evening clothes and his white tie? He would have to live entirely, one fears, upon his “facile philosophy,” as snails were once reputed to subsist on their own succulence.

XIII

HOOF-MARKS OF THE VANDAL

The barbarian gives to the earth he lives on an aspect of rough
brutality.--ELISÉE RECLUS.

Humanitarianism is not merely an expression of sympathy with pain: it is a protest against all tyranny and desecration, whether such wrong be done by the infliction of suffering on sentient beings, or by the Vandalism which can ruthlessly destroy the natural grace of the earth. It is in man’s dealings with the mountains, where, owing to the untameable wildness of the scenery, any injury is certain to be irreparable, that the marks of the modern Vandal are most clearly seen.

It so happens that as I have known the mountains of Carnarvonshire and Cumberland rather intimately for many years, the process of spoliation which, as Elisée Reclus has remarked, is a characteristic of barbarism, has been there forced on my attention. It is close on half a century since I was introduced to some of the wildest mountains of North Wales by that muscular bishop, Dr. G. A. Selwyn, of whom I have spoken in an earlier chapter, when, as tutor to his nephew, I was one of an episcopal party that went on a summer holiday from Lichfield to Penmaenmawr. There the bishop relaxed very genially from the austere dignities of his Palace: and having procured an Ordnance map, was not only taken with a desire to find his way across the heights to Llyn-an-Afon, a tarn which nestles under the front of the great range of Carnedd Llewelyn, but insisted on being accompanied by his nephew and his nephew’s tutor. Mountaineering, as I afterwards saw, could not have been one of Dr. Selwyn’s many accomplishments; for we had to make more than one expedition before we set eyes on the lake, and in the course of our first walk he slipped on a steep ridge and put his thumb out of joint, to the secret amusement, I had reason to fear, of my pupil, who, greatly disliking these forced marches into the wilderness, regarded the accident as a nemesis on an uncle’s despotism. But to me the experience of those bleak uplands was invaluable, for it was the beginning of a love of mountains, both Cambrian and Cumbrian, which led me to return to them again and again, until I had paid over a hundred visits to their chief summits. Thus I could not fail to note, now in the one district, now in the other, how the hand of the desecrator had been busy.

Recent discussions in the press on the subject of the proposed Sty Head motor-road have been useful in two ways: first, they called forth so strong and general an expression of opinion against that ill-advised project, as to render its realization extremely unlikely for a long time to come; and secondly, they drew attention to the wider and deeper under-lying question of the preservation of British mountain scenery against Vandalism of various kinds. The attempt on the Sty Head was in itself a significant object-lesson in the dangers by which our mountain “sanctuaries” are beset. A hundred and fifty years ago the poet Gray could write thus of the hamlet of Seathwaite, where the famous Pass has its entrance on the Borrowdale side:

“All further access is here barred to prying mortals, only there is
a little path winding over the fells, and for some weeks in the
year passable to the dalesmen; but the mountains know well that
these innocent people will not reveal the mysteries of their
ancient kingdom.”

If the mountains held that belief, it was _they_, not the dalesmen, who were the innocents, for the little path has been found passable at every season of the year; and Mr. G. D. Abraham, himself a distinguished climber, and a native of the district, was so willing to reveal the mountain mysteries as to plead in his book on _Motor Ways in Lakeland_ for the construction of a highroad from the very point where all farther access used to be barred. “The quaint little old-world hamlet,” he said, “will doubtless recover its glory of former days when the highway over Sty Head Pass becomes an accomplished fact.”

The love of mountains, itself a growth of modern times, has in fact brought with it a peril which did not exist before; it has opened the gateway and pointed the path to the shrine; but where the worshipper enters, what if the destroyer enters too? What if the pilgrim is close followed by the prospector?

Some years ago Mr. C. P. Trevelyan, M.P., introduced an “Access to Mountains Bill,” which while safeguarding the interests of land-owners, would have permitted pedestrians to indulge their love of highland scenery by making their way to the summits of uncultivated mountain or moorland. All nature-lovers must desire that such a measure may become law; and it might be hoped that landlords themselves would not persist in opposing it, for consideration should show them that it is impossible permanently to exclude the people from the hilltops of their native land. Even now, since it is the difficult and the forbidden which attract, there is a certain relish in the attempted ascent of those heights which in the landlord’s sense (not the climber’s) are still “inaccessible”--just as the cragsmen find a pleasure in striving to surmount the obstacles of rock-face or gully. Who has not longed to cross the lofty frontier into some deer-stalking or grouse-shooting Thibet, where, beyond the familiar lying sign-post stating that “trespassers will be prosecuted,” all is vagueness and mystery? What mountain-lover has not at times sought to snatch an “access to mountains” where access was denied?

I still recall the zest of a raid, albeit unsuccessful, on one of the summits of the Grampians, when our small party of climbers, starting from Aviemore, and passing the heathery shores of Loch-an-Eilan, fell in near “the Argyle Stone” with a number of deer-stalkers, who groaned aloud in their fury when they heard by what route we had ascended, and insisted on our going down to Kincraig. We had spoiled their day’s sport, they told us; and we, while regretting to have done so, could not refrain from saying that they had equally spoiled ours. We were consoled, however, in some measure, during that inglorious descent, by the sight of an osprey, or fishing-eagle, hovering over the river Spey: doubtless the bird was one of a pair that for years haunted Loch-an-Eilan, until the cursed cupidity of egg-collectors drove them from almost their last breeding-place.

One of the most inaccessible heights in England at the present day is Kinderscout, the “Peak” of Derbyshire, a triangular plateau of heathery moorland, with rocky “edges” broken into fantastic turrets and “castles.” Here only do the Derbyshire hills show some true mountain characteristics; and the central position of the “Peak,” which is about twenty miles equidistant from Sheffield, Manchester, and Huddersfield, would seem to mark it as a unique playground for the dwellers in our great manufacturing towns. In reality, it is a _terra incognita_ to all but a very few, a place not for workers to find health in, but for sportsmen to shoot grouse; and there is no spot in England which is guarded against intruders with more jealous care. I speak advisedly, for I once tried, with some friends, to “rush” the summit-ridge from the public path which crosses its western shoulders, only to be overtaken and turned back by some skilfully posted gamekeeper.[36] The loss to the public of a right of way over these moors, as over many similar places, is deplorable; and here, as elsewhere, the compromise that has been arrived at has been greatly to the landlord’s advantage, for while the grouse-shooter excludes the public from a vast area of moorland, the wayfarer finds himself limited to the narrowest of roundabout routes, and is insulted, as at Ashop Head, by a perfect plague of notice-boards threatening all the imaginary pains and penalties of the law for any divergence on to the hillside. Certainly an Access to Mountains Bill is urgently required.

But there is one thing which is even worse than too little access to mountains, and that is the concession of too much. It were heartily to be wished that such districts as those of the Lakes, Snowdonia, and others which might be named, had long ago been made inaccessible, in this sense, to the railway-lord, the company-promoter, and all the other Vandals who for commercial purposes would destroy the sanctitude of the hills. We have, in fact, to consider what _sort_ of access we propose, for just as there is all the difference in the world between the admission of the public to see a grand piece of statuary, and the admission of the man who has a design to chip the statue’s nose, so we have to distinguish between those who come to the mountains to speculate on the beauties of Nature and those who come there to speculate in a baser sense. Access to mountains is in itself most desirable, but what if we end by having no mountains to approach? In this respect the Bill might be strengthened, by making it withhold from the Vandal the access which it would bestow on the mountaineer.

Already much that was of inestimable value has been lost. The Lake District has in this respect been more fortunate than some other localities, because, owing to the powerful sentiment aroused by the Lake poets, there is a considerable public opinion opposed to any act of desecration. For this we have to thank, in the first place, the great name of Wordsworth, and, next, the faithful band of defenders which has stood between the enterprising contractor and his prey, as in the case of the once threatened railway to Ambleside and Grasmere. But even in Lakeland no little damage has been done, as by the mining which has ruined the scenery of Coniston, and by the permission granted to Manchester to turn the once sylvan and secluded Thirlmere into a suburban tank--Thirlmere first, and now the ruin of Haweswater is to follow.

Mention has been made in an earlier part of this book of a visit which I paid to Coniston in the winter of 1878-79. It so happened that a spell of severe frost and cloudless skies had then turned the Lakeland mountains into a strange realm of enchantment, the rocks being fantastically coated with fronds and feathers of snow, and the streams and waterfalls frozen into glittering masses of ice. I was the only visitor in the place (it was before Mr. Harrison Riley’s arrival), and for several days I had been scrambling over the range of the Old Man mountain without meeting a human being, when one afternoon, on the shore of Levers Water, a solitary figure came suddenly round a buttress of the hill and stalked silently past me as if wrapped in thought. I knew at once that it was Ruskin, for what other inhabitant of Coniston would be on the fells at such a season?

A few days later, when I went to Brantwood with Harrison Riley, as I have described, Ruskin talked a good deal of his favourite mountain haunts, as he showed us his wild strawberry beds, and terraces on the hillside made like Swiss roads; also a small beck running through his grounds to the lake, which he said was never dry, and was as precious to him as a stream of pure gold. The Lake scenery, he said, almost compensated him for the loss of Switzerland, which he could not hope to see again; his feeling for it was one less of affection than of “veneration.” But the sunsets had been a disappointment to him, for the sky above the Old Man was often sullen and overclouded, and this he attributed to the poisonous influence of the copper mines.

At present the chief danger to the quietude and beauty of the Lake district seems to be the motor-craze, especially that form of it which has been called “the fascinating sport of hill-hunting,” a game which has turned the Kirkstone Pass into a place of terror, where noisy machines pant and snort up one side and scorch furiously down the other, and which is now craving new heights to conquer. If not on the Sty Head, why not make a motor-way of the old track from Langdale to Eskdale over the passes of Wrynose and Hardknott? Such was the “compromise” which some mountain-lovers unwisely suggested, forgetting, first, that even this surrender, though less deadly than that of the Sty Head, would involve the destruction of a wild and primitive tract, and secondly that, as there is no finality in such dealings, it would only whet the motorists’ appetite for more. It is generally overlooked, too, though the point is a very important one, that the invaders have already got much more than their due share of the district; for the making of many of the roads now in existence would have been strongly opposed years ago, if it had been possible to foresee the riotous use to which they would be put.

But it is when we turn to the mountains of Snowdonia that we see what inexcusable injury has been done by the rapacity of private enterprise, connived at by the indifference of the public. It is a somewhat strange fact that, while there is an English branch of the League for the Preservation of Swiss Scenery, no organized attempt is made to preserve our own mountain scenery, not from desecration merely, but from destruction.[37]

Take, for example, the case of the River Glaslyn, which flows from the heart of Snowdon through Cwm Dyli and Nant Gwynant, till it finds its way by the Pass of Aberglaslyn to the sea. Visitors are often invited to admire the “power works,” erected some years ago at the head of Nant Gwynant, and other signs of enterprise; but from the nature-lover’s point of view there is a different tale to tell. The once shapely peak of Snowdon has been blunted into a formless cone by the Summit Hotel, which has since added to its premises a battlemented wall built of red brick; both Glaslyn and Llyn Llydaw, two tarns of flawless natural beauty, have long been befouled with copper mines; and more recently the glorious waterfall, through which the stream dashed headlong from Cwm Dyli to Nant Gwynant, has been replaced by a line of hideous metal pipes, by which the whole hillside is scarred. As for the far-famed Pass of Aberglaslyn, defaced as it is by railway works and tunnellings, remorselessly begun and then temporarily abandoned, its state can only be described as one of stagnant devastation.

Yet all this mountain scenery, which has been foolishly sacrificed for private purposes, might have been a public possession of inestimable value had it been tended as it deserved; and much yet remains in Snowdonia that might be saved for the enjoyment and refreshment of future generations, if the apathy of public feeling, and of the Welsh people, could be dispelled. But it is useless to look for local resistance to this vandalism, for one is always met by the assertion, true but irrelevant, that such enterprises “give work”; which, indeed, would equally justify the pulling down of Westminster Abbey to “give work” to the unemployed of London. Nothing but an enlightened public opinion, unmistakably expressed, can now avert the destruction (for such it is) of the noblest of Welsh, perhaps of all British mountains.

It is strange that the incongruity--the lack of humour--in these outrages on the sanctitude of a great mountain does not make itself felt. What could be more ridiculous, apart from the gross vandalism of the act, than to put a railway-station on Snowdon? A friend who knows the Welsh mountains intimately told me that on his first visit to the peak, after the building of the Summit Hotel, he remarked to a companion: “We shall be expected to have a green chartreuse after lunch here.” A waiter, overhearing him, said: “We ain’t got no green chartreuse, sir; but we have cherry brandy and curaçoa, if you like.”

In a little book entitled _On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills_, published in 1908, I commented strongly on these outrages, and the justice of my criticisms with regard to the ruin of Welsh mountain scenery was not seriously disputed in the local press, though one editor did accuse me of being guilty of “a wicked libel upon the people of Wales,” and expressed himself as having been caused “real pain” by my remarks. When, however, I asked him to consider what real pain the disfigurement of Snowdon had caused to mountain-lovers, and suggested that, instead of taking me to task, he should try to arouse his readers to put an end to the vandalism which, for the sake of a temporary profit, is ruining some of the finest portions of Carnarvonshire, he made a reply which was, in fact, a most signal corroboration of my complaint; for he stated that I had evidently “no conception of the difficulties which residents in North Wales have to encounter when they oppose any commercial enterprise, backed up by English speculators, which threatens to spoil our beauty-spots.”[38] There we have the fatal truth in a sentence! What is spoiling Snowdonia is the commercial cupidity of the Welsh themselves, utilized by English capitalists. The editor naïvely added that, were I myself living in North Wales, I should be “more sympathetic.” More sympathetic, that is, with the Welsh residents, who know that their country is being spoiled, but dare not say so; less sympathetic with the mountain-lovers who deplore this crime!

In the excuses put forward for the invasion of the mountains with funicular railways, motor high-roads, and the like, there is a comic element which would be vastly entertaining if the very existence of mountain scenery were not at stake. Thus I have been met with the argument that a mountain railway, such as that on Snowdon, “takes into a purer atmosphere and into an ennobling environment those who have no other way of learning the lesson that grand mountains can teach,” to wit, “the enfeebled toilers of the towns.” I was reminded, as one convicted of “a little selfishness,” that “the weak and the feeble have to be considered, as well as the athletic and the hardy.” But, in the first place, those who travel by so expensive a route as this mountain railway are rarely the toilers of the towns, nor, so far as I have observed them, are they “the weak and the feeble.” They seem to be mostly able-bodied well-to-do tourists, who are too lazy to use their legs. I once overheard a passenger in a train, describing a recent Swiss trip, make the remark: “Oh, no, I didn’t _walk_ a step. Funicular railways up nearly all the mountains--Pilatus, Rigi, and the rest. I wouldn’t give a fig to _walk_.”

It is amusing, too, to find “imperial” reasons advanced in defence of the Snowdon railroad, in what is called the “Official Guide,” a pamphlet published by the London and North-Western Railway at Llanberis England, we are proudly told, “does not usually care to be behind other countries in matters of progress, but, with regard to the application of mechanical means for reaching the peaks of mountains, until now it has certainly been so.” The inference is obvious. Patriotic climbers should ascend Snowdon by train.

Then there is the clever appeal to the sense of peril and romance. We are informed in the same disinterested treatise that the owner of Snowdon (yes, reader, Snowdon is _owned_!), “having regard to the exigencies of the modern tourist, the increasing eagerness of people to ‘do’ Snowdon, and the dangers which beset the ordinary ways available for that purpose, felt that the solitude and sanctity of Snowdon ought, to a certain extent, to give way before the progressive advance of the age.” And again: “Hitherto none but the most daring or the most sanguine would venture to ascend during a storm.... None the less, however, Snowdon during a storm presents a scene of impressive grandeur, and the new railway will make it possible to see it under this aspect without risk.” Henceforth poets will know how to view the grandeur of the gathering storm. “I climbed the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn,” sang Scott. The modern singer will take a ticket on the Snowdon Mountain Tramroad.

The true objection to mountain railways is not that they bring more people to the mountain, but that they spoil the very thing that the people come to see, viz. the mountain itself. The environment, in fact, is no longer “ennobling” when a mountain-top is vulgarized, as Snowdon has been, by a railway and hotel; it is then not a mountain scene at all. There are numberless points of view in North Wales, and in every highland district, to which the weak and feeble can be easily conveyed, and from which they can see the mountains at their best; but to construct a railway to the chief summit is “to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs,” because, when that is done, there is no mountain (in the true sense) any longer for the enjoyment of either feeble or strong.

And surely the feeble can seek their enjoyment in fitter ways than in being hauled up mountains by steam. I have heard of a blind man who walked, with a friend to guide him, to the top of Goatfell, in the Isle of Arran, because he wished to feel the mountain air and to hear the thunder of the sea waves far away below. Was not that better than spoiling Goatfell with a rail? Not, of course, that such railways are really made for the benefit of the feeble-bodied; they are built for commercial purposes, to put money into private pockets at the expense of scenery which should belong to the community as a whole.

But it is not only the nature-lover and the rock-climber who are interested in the preservation of mountains; the naturalist also, and the botanist, are very deeply concerned, for the extermination of the rarer fauna and flora is practically assured unless the onroad of this vandalism is checked. The golden eagle, the kite, and the osprey are gone. Do we desire such birds as the raven, the chough, the buzzard, and the peregrine falcon to survive in their few remaining strongholds? If so, we must take measures to stop the depredations not only of the egg-collecting tourist, but of the death-dealing gamekeeper.

The flight of the buzzard is one of the greatest glories of the hills of Cumberland and Carnarvonshire, and it is deeply to be regretted that so beautiful and harmless a bird should be wantonly destroyed. The worst--or should we say the best?--that can be said of the buzzard is that in very rare instances he has been known to “stoop” at persons who approach his eyrie. In a letter which appeared in the _Lakes Chronicle_ some years ago a tourist absurdly complained that he had been attacked on a mountain near Windermere by a “huge bird “--evidently a buzzard--and urged that “it would be to the advantage of the public if some good shot were to free the mountain of this foul-fiend usurper.” The buzzard defending his nest is a “foul-fiend usurper”! Such is the amount of sympathy which the average tourist has with the wild mountain bird! And as for the ornithological knowledge, this may be judged from the fact that a similar incident on the same mountain was actually described in the papers under the head, “_Bustard_ attacks a clergyman.”

Of the wild upland flora there is the same tale to tell. The craze for collecting, and what is worse, uprooting, the rarer Alpine plants has almost brought about the extinction of several species, such as the _saxifraga nivalis_, which used to be fairly frequent on Snowdon, Helvellyn, and other British hills; and this in spite of the many appeals that have been made to the better feeling of tourists. Public spirit in these matters seems to be wellnigh dead.

What, then, is being done, in the face of these destructive agencies, to preserve our wild mountain districts, and the wild life that is native to them, from the ruin with which they are threatened? As far as I am aware, apart from occasional protests in newspapers, this only--that appeals are made to the public from time to time by the National Trust and kindred societies to save, by private purchase, certain “beauty spots” from spoliation. These appeals cannot but meet with the entire approval of nature-lovers, and the rescuing of such estates as Catbells, Gowbarrow, Grange Fell, and others that might be mentioned, represents a real measure of success. Still the question has to be faced--what is to be done in the future if, as is certain to happen, the menace to our mountains is maintained? It is too much to hope that large sums can always be raised by private subscription; also, while one favoured place is being safeguarded, others, less fortunate, are being destroyed. We cannot save our mountains generally by these piecemeal purchases; for even if the money were always procurable, the rate of destruction exceeds that of purchase, and the power of the many syndicates that would exploit the mountains must necessarily be greater than that of the few Societies that would preserve them. In a word, private action is quite inadequate, in the long run, to repel so extensive an attack.

What is needed is public action on a scale commensurate with the evil, in the direction of the “reservation” of certain districts as sanctuaries for all wild life. We need, in fact, highland parks, in which the hills themselves, with the wild animals and plants whose life is of the hills, shall be preserved in their wildness as the property of the people; an arrangement which would be equally gratifying to the nature-lover, the naturalist, and the mountaineer, and of vastly more “profit” to the nation as a whole than the disfigurement of its beautiful places.

Without at all suggesting that the National Trust should relax its efforts for the rescue by purchase of particular tracts, I think that it would be doing a still greater service if it could see its way to organizing a movement for pressing on the Government the urgent need of taking some active steps to counteract the injury which is being done by commercial interests to the true interests of the people. Otherwise the result will be that while a few spots are saved, whole districts will be lost, and eventually all that the nation will possess will be some oases of beauty in a desert of ugliness.

As I have elsewhere pointed out,[39] there is only one thorough solution of the problem, and that is, to nationalize such districts as Snowdonia, Lakeland, the Peak of Derbyshire, and other public holiday-haunts, and so to preserve them for the use and enjoyment of the people for all time. “If parks, open spaces, railways, tramways, water, and other public needs can be nationalized, why not mountains? It is impossible to over-estimate the value of mountains as a recreation-ground for soul and body; yet, while we are awaking to the need of maintaining public rights in other directions, we are allowing our mountains--in North Wales and elsewhere--to be sacrificed to commercial selfishness. If Snowdon, for instance, had been purchased by the public twenty years ago, the investment would have been a great deal more profitable than those in which we usually engage; but while we are willing to spend vast sums on grabbing other people’s territory, we have not, of course, a penny to spare for the preservation of our own.”

XIV

THE FORLORN HOPE

At least we witness of thee, ere we die,
That these things are not otherwise, but thus.
SWINBURNE.

Twenty-four years’ work with the Humanitarian League had left many problems unsolved, many practical matters undecided; but on one point some of us were now in no sort of uncertainty--that a race which still clung tenaciously to the practices at which I have glanced in the foregoing chapters was essentially barbaric, not in its diet only, though the butchery of animals for food had first arrested our attention, but also, and not less glaringly, in its penal system, its sports, its fashions, and its general way of regarding that great body of our fellow-beings whom we call “the animals.” It did not need Mr. Howard Moore’s very suggestive book, _Savage Survivals_,[40] to convince us of this; but we found in the conclusions reached by him an ample corroboration of those we had long had in mind, and which alone could explain the stubborn adherence of educated as well as uneducated classes to a number of primitive and quite uncivilized habits. “It is not possible,” he says, “to understand the things higher men do, nor to account for the things that you find in their natures, unless you recognize the fact that higher men are merely savages made over and only partially changed.”

Professor F. W. Newman’s warning, that the time was not ripe for a Humanitarian League, had to this extent been verified: if we had thought that we were going to effect any great visible changes, we should have been justly disappointed. But those who work with no expectation of seeing results cannot be disappointed; they are beyond the scope of failure, and may even meet, as we did, with some small and unforeseen success. The League was thus, in the true sense of the term, a Forlorn Hope; that is, a troop of venturesome pioneers, who were quite untrammelled by “prospects,” and whose whim it was to open out a path by which others might eventually follow.

Perhaps the success of the League lay less in what it did than in what it _demanded_--less, that is, in the defeat of a flogging Bill, or in the abolition of a cruel sport, than in the fearless, logical, and unwavering assertion of a clear principle of humaneness, which applies to the case of human and non-human alike. After all, it does not so greatly matter whether this or that particular form of cruelty is prohibited; what matters is that _all_ forms of cruelty should be shown to be incompatible with progress. Here, I venture to think, the intellectual and controversial side of the League’s work was of some value; for before a new system could be built up, the ground had to be cleared, and the main obstacle to humanitarianism had long been the very widespread contempt for what is known as “sentiment,” and the idea that humanitarians were a poor weakly folk who might be ridiculed with impunity. The Humanitarian League changed all that; and a good many pompous persons, who had come into collision with its principles, emerged with modified views and a considerably enlarged experience.

I have already spoken of some of the protagonists of the League: at this point it may be fitting to recount, in epic fashion, the names and services of a few of the influential allies who from time to time lent us their aid.

Mr. Herbert Spencer’s philosophical writings were fully imbued with the humane spirit. An opponent of militarism, of vindictive penal laws, of corporal punishment for the young, of cruel sports, and indeed of every form of brutality, he had done as much as any man of his generation to humanize public opinion. He willingly signed the Humanitarian League’s memorials against the Royal Buckhounds and the Eton Beagles.

Dr. Alfred R. Wallace was also in full accord with us, and he was especially interested in our protest against the Game Laws, “those abominable engines of oppression and selfishness,” as he described them in one of several letters which I received from him. He was anxious that some Member of Parliament should be found who would move an annual resolution for the abolition of these laws, and he considered that such a motion “would serve as a very good test of Liberalism and Radicalism.” In reference to flogging under the old Vagrancy Act, he wrote: “There are scores or hundreds of these old laws which are a disgrace to civilization. Many years ago I advocated enacting a law for the automatic termination of _all_ laws after, say, fifty years, on the ground that one generation cannot properly legislate for a later one under totally different conditions.”

“The Truth about the Game Laws,” a pamphlet of which Dr. Wallace expressed much approval, was written by Mr. J. Connell, author of “The Red Flag,” whose democratic instincts had led him to acquire first-hand knowledge of the nocturnal habits of game-keepers, and was prefaced with some spirited remarks by Mr. Robert Buchanan, who, as having been for many years a devotee of sport, here occupied, as he himself expressed it, “the position of the converted clown who denounces topsy-turvydom.” Buchanan’s humane sympathies were shown in many of his poems, as in his “Song of the Fur Seal,” inspired by one of the League’s pamphlets; he wrote also a powerful article on “The Law of Infanticide,” in reference to one of those cruel cases in which the death-sentence is passed on some poor distracted girl, and which clearly demonstrate, as Buchanan pointed out, that “we are still a savage and uncivilized people, able and willing to mow down with artillery such subject races as are not of our way of thinking, but utterly blind and indifferent to the sorrows of the weak and the sufferings of the martyred poor.”

George Meredith, for the last ten or twelve years of his life, was a friend and supporter of the League. “On a point or two of your advocacy,” he wrote to me, “I am not in accord with you, but fully upon most.” He declared the steel trap to be “among the most villainous offences against humanity”; and he more than once signed the League’s memorials against such spurious sports as rabbit-coursing and stag-hunting. When the Royal Buckhounds were abolished in 1891, he wrote to us: “Your efforts have gained their reward, and it will encourage you to pursue them in all fields where the good cause of sport, or any good cause, has to be cleansed of blood and cruelty. So you make steps in our civilization.”

Mr. Thomas Hardy more than once lent his name to the League’s petitions, and recognized that in its handling of the problem of animals’ rights it was grappling with the question “of equal justice all round.” In an extremely interesting letter, read at the annual meeting in 1910, he expressed his opinion that “few people seem to perceive fully, as yet, that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called the Golden Rule from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom.” This was, of course, the main contention of the Humanitarian League.