Chapter IX: Part 9

There gorgeous Plato’s spirit
Hangs brooding like a dove,
And all men born inherit
Love free as gods above;
There each one is to other
A sister or a brother,
A father or a mother,
A lover or a love.

Meantime it would almost seem that to the religious folk who assume a perpetuity of individual life, the thought of death sometimes becomes less solemn, less sacred, than it is to those who have no supernatural beliefs. The easy assurance of immortality to which friends who are writing letters of condolence to a mourner too often have recourse, is usually a sign less of sympathy than of the lack of it; for it is not sympathetic to repeat ancient formulas in face of a present and very real grief; indeed, it is in many cases an impertinence, when it is done without any regard to the views of the person to whom such solace is addressed. Among the professional ghouls who watch the death-notices in the papers, none, perhaps, are more callous--not even the would-be buyers of old clothes or artificial teeth--than the pious busybodies who intrude on homes of sorrow with their vacant tracts and booklets. Nay, worse: nowadays mourners are lucky if some spiritist acquaintance does not have a beatific vision of the lost one; for the dead seem to be regarded as a lawful prey by any one who sees visions and dreams dreams, and who is determined to call them as witnesses that there is no reality in the most stringent ordinances of nature:

Stern law of every mortal lot;
Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear,
And builds himself I know not what
Of second life I know not where.

With much appropriateness did Matthew Arnold introduce his trenchant rebuke of human arrogance into a poem on the grave of a dog; for mankind has neither right nor reason to presume for itself an hereafter which it denies to humbler fellow-beings who share at least the ability to suffer and to love. Can any one, not a mere barbarian, who has watched the death of an animal whom he loved, and by whom he was himself loved with that faithful affection which is never withheld when it is merited, dare to doubt that the conditions of life and death are essentially the same for human and for non-human? Is an animal’s death one whit less poignant in remembrance than that of one’s dearest human friend? Must it not remain with us as ineffaceably?

That individual love should resent the thraldom of death may be unreasonable; but it is useless to ignore the fact of such resentment, or to proffer consolations which can neither convince nor console. From the earliest times the poets, above all others, have borne witness to love’s protest. Perhaps the most moving lyric in Roman literature is that short elegy written by Catullus at his brother’s grave, full of a deep passion which can hardly be conveyed in another tongue.

Borne far o’er many lands, o’er many seas,
On this sad service, brother, have I sped,
To proffer thee death’s last solemnities,
And greet, though words be vain, the silent dead:
For thou art lost, so cruel fate decrees;
Ah, brother, from my sight untimely fled!
Yet take these gifts, ordained in bygone years
For mournful dues when funeral rites befell;
Take them, all streaming with a brother’s tears:
And thus, for evermore--hail and farewell!

A similar cry is heard in that famous passage of Virgil, where the bereaved Orpheus refuses to be comforted for the loss of his Eurydice. And nearly two thousand years later we find Wordsworth, a Christian poet, echoing the same lamentation:

... When I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn,
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

Mark the reference to “years unborn.” Wordsworth was a believer in immortality; but immortality itself cannot restore what is past and gone. All the sages and seers and prophets, that have given mankind the benefit of their wisdom since the world began, have so far failed to provide the least crumb of comfort for the ravages of death, or to explain why love should be for ever built up to be for ever overthrown, and why union should always be followed by disseverance.

There may, of course, be a solution of this tragedy hereafter to be discovered by mankind; all that we know is that, as yet, no human being has found the clue to the mystery, or, if he has found it, has vouchsafed the knowledge to his fellow-mortals. For we must dismiss as idle the assertion that such things cannot be communicated in words. Anything that is apprehended by the mind can be expressed by the mouth--not adequately, perhaps, yet still, in some measure, expressed--and the reason why this greatest of secrets has never been conveyed is that, as yet, it has never been apprehended.

It is, doubtless, this lack of any real knowledge, of any genuine consolation, that drives mankind to seek refuge in the more primitive superstitions. Something more definite, more tangible, is not unnaturally desired; and therefore men turn to the assurances of what is called spiritualism--the refusal to believe that death, in the accepted sense, has taken place at all. This creed is at least free from the vagueness of the ordinary religious view of death. It is small comfort to be told that a lost friend is sitting transfigured, harp in hand, in some skiey mansion of the blest; but it might mitigate the bereavement of some mourners (not all) to converse with their lost one, and to learn that he exists in much the same manner, and with the same affections as before. Some who “prefer him earthly” are less likely to be disappointed in spiritualism than in any other philosophy; the danger is rather that they should find him _too_ earthly--enjoying a cigarette, perhaps, as in a case mentioned in recent revelations of the spirit-life. This is literalness with a vengeance; but however ludicrous and incredible it may be, it is not--from the comforter’s point of view--meaningless; whereas it _is_ unmeaning to tell a mourner that the loved one is not lost, to him, when the whole environment and fabric of their love are shattered and destroyed.

Is there, then--pending such fuller knowledge as mankind may hereafter gain--no present comfort for death’s tyranny? I have spoken of the poets as the champions of love against death; and it is perhaps in poetry, the poetry of love and death, that the best solace will be found--in that open-eyed and quite rational view of the struggle, which does not deny the reality of death, but asserts the reality of love. It is amusing to hear those who do not accept the orthodox creed as regards an after-life described as cold “materialists” and “sceptics.” For who have written most loftily, most spiritually, about death and the great emotions that are implied in the word--the religionists and “spiritualists,” who pretend to a mystic knowledge, or the great free-thinking poets, from the time of Lucretius to the time of Shelley and James Thomson? Can any “spiritualist” poetry match the great sublime passages of the _De Rerum Naturâ_, or, to come to our own age, of _The City of Dreadful Night_?

It is to the poets, then, not to the dogmatists, that we must look for solace; for, where knowledge is still unattainable, an aspiration is wiser than an assertion, and the theme of death is one which can be far better treated idealistically than as a matter of doctrine. In poetry, as nowhere else, can be expressed those manifold moods, and half-moods, in which the noblest human minds have sought relief when confronted by this mighty problem; and far more soothing than any unsubstantial promises of futurity is the charm that is felt in the magic of beautiful verse. In Milton’s words:

... I was all ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of death.

At the present time, when a great war has brought bereavement into so many homes, and when superstition is reaping its harvest among the sad and broken lives that are everywhere around us, how can rational men do better than recall as many minds as possible from the false teachers to the true, from the priests, who claim a knowledge which they do not possess, to the poets, in whom, as Shelley said, there is “the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature”? And the testimony of the poets cannot be mistaken; their first word and their last word is Love. Whether it be Cowper, gazing on his mother’s portrait; or Burns, lamenting his Highland Mary; or Wordsworth, in his elegies for Lucy; or Shelley, in the raptures of his “Adonais”; or pessimists, such as Edgar Poe and James Thomson, to whom love was the “sole star of light in infinite black despair”--the lesson that we learn from them is the same. For death there is no solace but in love; it is to love’s name that the human heart must cling.

Ah! let none other alien spell soe’er,
But only the one Hope’s one name be there,
Not less, nor more, but even that word alone!

XVII

THE TALISMAN

Comprendre c’est Pardonner.--MADAME DE STAËL.

Are we, then, a civilized people? Has the Man of to-day, still living by bloodshed, still striving to grow rich at the expense of his neighbour, still using torture in punishment, still seeking sport in destruction, still waging fratricidal wars, and, while making a hell on earth, claiming for himself an eternal heaven hereafter--has this selfish, predatory being arrived at a state of “civilization”?

It may be said, perhaps, that as the ideal is always in advance of the actual, and it is easy to show that any present stage of society falls far short of what it might be and ought to be, the distinction between savagery and civilization is a matter of names. This, in one sense, is true; but it is also true that names are of great importance as reacting upon conduct, and that to use flattering titles as a veil for cruel practices gives permanence to evils that otherwise would not be permitted. Our present self-satisfaction in what we are pleased to call our civilization is a very serious obstacle to improvement.

In this manner euphemism plays a great part in language; for just as the Greeks used gracious terms to denote malignant powers, and so, as they thought, to disarm their hostility, the modern mind seeks, consciously or unconsciously, to disguise iniquities by misnaming them. Thus a blind tribal hatred can be masked as “patriotism”; living idly on the work of others is termed “an independence”; vivisection cloaks itself as “research”; and the massacre of wild animals for man’s wanton amusement is dignified as “sport.” There is undoubtedly much virtue in names.

But here another objection may be raised, to wit, that in view of the vast advance that has been made by mankind from primeval savagery to the present complex social state, it is impossible to apply to the higher man the same name as to the lower man; for if _we_ are savages, what are the Bushmen or the Esquimaux?

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

It may be doubted whether of late years Europe has been pleasanter as a residential district than Cathay; but, letting that pass, must we not admit that a real culture implies something more than material and mental opulence? “Civilization,” as a French writer has lately said, “is not in this terrible trumpery: if it is not in the heart of man, then it exists nowhere.”[46] It is easy to frame “ethnical periods,” as is done in Morgan’s _Ancient Society_, in which are postulated the three phases--Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization--the last-named commencing with the invention of a Phonetic Alphabet; but such a definition, when put to practical test, seems a somewhat fanciful one. The brute who tortures or butchers a sentient fellow-being remains a brute, whether a Phonetic Alphabet has been invented or not. He has not learnt the ABC of civilization. What is needed, for the measurement of human progress, is a standard of ethical, not ethnical refinement.

That mankind has already advanced so far is a sign, not that it has now reached its zenith, but that it has yet further to advance; and this advance will be delayed, not promoted, by the refusal to recognize that the physical and mental sciences have far outrun the moral--that, despite our multifarious discoveries and accomplishments, we are still barbarians at heart.

In this sense, then, we are savages; and the knowledge of that fact is the first step toward civilization. There is a line which pious zoophilists are fond of quoting to sportsmen or other thoughtless persons who ill-use their humbler fellow-creatures:

Remember, He who made thee made the brute.

The reminder is wholesome, for kinship is too apt to be forgotten; but I would venture to interpret that significant verse in a much more literal sense; for it must be confessed that many a human being, if judged by his actions, is not only _related_ to the brute, but is _himself_ the brute. The old Greek maxim, “Know thyself,” is the starting-point of all reformation.

Through this knowledge, and only through it, can come the patience which forgives because it fully understands: “Comprendre c’est pardonner” is assuredly one of the world’s greatest sayings.

He pardons all, who all can understand.

There is no need to search for extenuating circumstances, because, as Ernest Crosby has remarked: “Is not the fact of being born a man or a woman an all-sufficient extenuating circumstance?” All is explained, when once we are content to look upon our fellow-beings, and upon ourselves, as what we verily are--a race of rough but not unkindly barbarians, emerging with infinite slowness to a more humanized condition, and to recognize that if mankind, even as it is, has been evolved from a still more savage ancestry, that fact is in itself a proof that progress is not wholly chimerical.

Considered from the point of view of personal happiness and peace of mind, the question is the same. To what sort of comfort can a person of sensibility hope to attain, in sight of the immense sum of wretchedness and suffering that is everywhere visible, and audible, around us? I know not a few humanitarians whose lives are permanently saddened by the thought of the awful destitution that afflicts large masses of mankind, and of the not less awful cruelties inflicted on the lower animals in the name of sport and science and fashion. How can sensitive and sympathetic minds forget the loss of other persons’ happiness in the culture of their own, especially if they have realized that not a little of their well-being is derived from the toil of their fellows?

Here, again, some measure of consolation may be found, if we look at the problem in a less sanguine and therefore less exacting spirit. People often indignantly ask, with reference to some cruel action or custom, whether we are living “in an age of civilization or of savagery,” the implication being that in an era of the highest and noblest civilization, such as ours is assumed to be, some unaccountably barbarous persons are stooping to an unworthy practice. Is it not wiser, and more conducive to one’s personal peace of mind, to reverse this assumption, and to start with the frank avowal that the present age, in spite of its vast mechanical cleverness, is, from an ethical point of view, one of positive barbarism, not so savage, of course, as some that have preceded it, but still undeniably savage as compared with what we foresee of a civilized future?

Viewed in this more modest light, many usages which, if prevalent in a civilized country, might well make one despair of humankind, are seen to be, like the crimes of children, symptoms of the thoughtless infancy of our race. We are not civilized folk who have degenerated into monsters, but untamed savages who, on the whole, make a rather creditable display, and may in future centuries become civilized.

For example, when one meets a number of “sportsmen” going forth, with horses and with hounds, to do to death with every circumstance of barbarity some wretched little animal whom they have actually bred, or “preserved,” or imported for the purpose, such a sight--if one regards them as rational and civilized beings--might well spoil one’s happiness for a fortnight. But if we take a lower stand, and see in them nothing more than fine strapping barbarians, engaged in one of the national recreations of those “dark ages” in which we live, the outlook becomes immediately a more cheerful one; and instead of being surprised that ladies and gentlemen in the twentieth century should desire to “break up” a fox, we are able to recognize the moderation and civility with which in other respects they conduct themselves.

One advantage, at least, can be drawn by humanitarians from the present state of affairs--a more accurate apprehension of the obstacles by which their hopes are beset. Much has been said and written about the causes of the war; and it is inevitable that the _immediate_ causes (for they alone are discussed) should be thoroughly investigated. But the deeper underlying causes of the recent war, and of every war, are not those upon which diplomatists and politicians and journalists and historians are intent: they must be sought in that callous and selfish habit of mind--common to all races, and as such accepted without thought, and transmitted from one generation to another--which exhibits itself not in war only, but in numerous other forms of barbarity observed in so-called civilized life.

No League of Nations, or of individuals, can avail, without a change of heart. Reformers of all classes must recognize that it is useless to preach peace by itself, or socialism by itself, or anti-vivisection by itself, or vegetarianism by itself, or kindness to animals by itself. The cause of each and all of the evils that afflict the world is the same--the general lack of humanity, the lack of the knowledge that all sentient life is akin, and that he who injures a fellow-being is in fact doing injury to himself. The prospects of a happier society are wrapped up in this despised and neglected truth, the very statement of which, at the present time, must (I well know) appear ridiculous to the accepted instructors of the people.

The one and only talisman is Love. Active work has to be done, but if it is to attain its end, it is in the spirit of love that it must be undertaken. Perhaps the most significant symptom of the brutishness aroused by the war-fever was the blank inability which many Christians showed not only to practise such injunctions as “Love your enemies,” but even to understand them.[47] Had it not been that humour, like humaneness, was sunk fathoms deep in an ocean of stupidity, one would have been tempted to quote Ernest Crosby’s delightful lines on “Love the Oppressors”:

Love the oppressors and tyrants:
It is the only way to get rid of them!

In these days, when the voice of hatred and malevolence is so dominant, it is a joy to turn to the pages of writers who proclaim a wiser faith. “This is a gray world,” says Howard Moore. “There is enough sorrow in it, even though we cease to scourge each other--the sorrow of floods, famines, fires, earthquakes, storms, diseases, and death. We should trust each other, and love each other, and sympathize with and help each other, and be patient and forgiving.” Nor is it only the human that claims our sympathy; for does not Pierre Loti, in his _Book of Pity and Death_, imagine even his stray Chinese cat, whom he had befriended on shipboard, addressing him in similar words: “In this autumn day, so sad to the heart of cats, since we are here together, both isolated beings ... suppose we give, one to the other, a little of that kindness which softens trouble, which resembles the immaterial and defies death, which is called affection, and which expresses itself from time to time by a caress.”

Has not this distracted world had enough, and more than enough, of jealousies and denunciations? Is it not time that we tried, in their stead, the effect, say, of a bombardment of blessings? If there are light-waves, heat-waves, sound-waves, may there not also be love-waves? How if we sent out a daily succession of these to earth’s uttermost parts? A benediction is as easily uttered as a curse; and it needs no priest to pronounce it. At least it is pleasant to think (and men put faith in creeds that are much less believable) that gentle thoughts, the “wireless” of the heart, may penetrate and be picked up in regions that are beyond our ken, and so create a more favourable atmosphere for gentle deeds. “Why did none of them tell me,” asks Crosby, “that my soul was a loving-machine?” It is strange, certainly, that we take so much more pains to kindle the fires of hate than the fires of love.

“Boundless compassion for all living beings,” says Schopenhauer, “is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man’s rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness.”[48] Incidentally it may be observed that, as Schopenhauer points out, the difficulties of what is called the sex question would in large measure be solved, if this rule of “injure no one” were more fully believed and acted on.

The lesson of the past six years is this. It is useless to hope that warfare, which is but one of many savage survivals, can be abolished, until the mind of man is humanized in other respects also--until _all_ savage survivals are at least seen in their true light. As long as man kills the lower races for food or sport, he will be ready to kill his own race for enmity. It is not _this_ bloodshed, or _that_ bloodshed, that must cease, but _all_ needless bloodshed--all wanton infliction of pain or death upon our fellow-beings. Only when the great sense of the universal kinship has been realized among us, will love cast out hatred, and will it become impossible for the world to witness anew the senseless horrors that disgrace Europe to-day.

Humanitarians, then, must expect little, but claim much; must know that they will see no present fruits of their labours, but that their labours are nevertheless of far-reaching importance. Let those who have been horrified by the spectacle of an atrocious war resolve to support the peace movement more strongly than ever; but let them also support the still wider and deeper humanitarian movement of which pacifism is but a part, inasmuch as all humane causes, though seemingly separate, are ultimately and essentially one.

POSTSCRIPT

In the preparation of this book I have used the substance of several articles that first appeared in the _Humane Review_, _Humanitarian_, _Literary Guide_, _Rationalist Press Association’s Annual_, _Vegetarian Messenger_, or elsewhere. Acknowledgment of certain other obligations is made in the footnotes.

INDEX

Adams, Francis, 83-85

Adams, George, 87

Adams, Maurice, 76, 77

_Adventurer_, the, 28, 29

Anderson, Martin (“Cynicus”), 204

Anderson, Sir Robert, 143, 144

Animals, kinship with man, 13, 14, 128, 130, 131;
deaths of, 130, 234;
“dumb,” 129;
rights of, 125-128, 132

Anthropocentric superstition, 13, 127, 128, 131

Arnold, Matthew, 45, 52, 234

Aveling, Edward, 80, 81, 95

Barlas, John, 85-87;
quoted, 233

_Beagler Boy_, the, 175, 176

Bell, Ernest, 124, 125, 211

Besant, Sir Walter, 115, 116

Big Game Hunting, 155, 156

“Blooding,” 13, 155

Blood-Sport, 12, 13, 151, 162, 171, 243

Bourchier, J. D., 57, 58

Bradshaw, Henry, 37-39

Browning, Oscar, 58, 59

Browning, Robert, 94

_Brutalitarian_, The, 174

Buchanan, Robert, 113, 202, 203

Buckland, James, 167

“Canonization of the Ogre,” 70, 71

Carpenter, Captain Alfred, R.N., 165, 210

Carpenter, Edward, 45, 61, 73, 75, 76, 87-89, 109, 110, 205, 206, 210

Carpenter, Dr. P. H., 62, 68

Catullus, quoted, 235

Champion, H. H., 61, 79, 86

Chesterton, G. K., 127, 128, 174, 178;
quoted, 135

Ching Ping, Chinese Mission to Eton, 176

Christmas cruelties, 215

Coit, Dr. Stanton, 70, 71

Colam, John, 149, 161, 162

_Comprendre c’est pardonner_, 241

Conda, Anna, her appeal to the Zoological Society, 165

Cornish, F. Warre, 19, 36

Cory, William, _see_ Johnson

Coulson, Colonel W. L. B., 124, 158, 159

Crane, Walter, 204, 216

Crosby, Ernest, 205, 206, 241, 244, 245

Darrow, Clarence, 206, 207

Day, Rev. Russell, 23, 24

de Quincey, Miss E., 118, 119

De Quincey, Thomas, 118-120;
quoted, 136

Deuchar, N. Douglas, 211;
quoted, 100

Dixie, Lady Florence, 159, 160

Dobell, Bertram, 102, 110, 111

Durnford, Rev. F. E., 23

Edwards, J. Passmore, 142, 209

Eton College, 16-35, 50-66

Eton Hare-hunt, 27, 56, 154, 155, 160, 175

Fabian Society, 81, 82

Feather and Fur Trades, 12, 148, 167, 168, 172

Fighting, fallacies about, 223-225, 228, 229

Flagellomania, 145, 146, 166

Flesh-eating, 9, 67-69, 148

Flogging, at Eton, 22, 23;
in Royal Navy, 138;
judicial, 135-137, 144-146

Foote, G. W., 94, 95, 98, 102, 208

Foxology, the, pronounced by an Archbishop, 171

Furnivall, Dr. F. J., 93, 94, 96, 97

Game Laws, 156, 157, 202

Garrotting, _not_ suppressed by the lash, 136, 137

George, Henry, 58, 61

Goodford, Dr. C. O., 28, 54

Greenwood, Sir George, 153, 176, 210

“Hag-traps,” 32

Hardy, Thomas, 203, 204;
quoted, 233

Harrison, Frederic, 128, 129

Hatred, carnival of, 220-222, 227, 230

Hopwood, C. H., 140

Hornby, Dr. J. J., 19, 20, 50, 56, 58-60;
on Shelley, 92

_Hudibras_, quoted, 13, 137

Hudson, W. H., 116-118, 210;
quoted, 66

Hughes, Rev. H. Price, 208, 212

_Humane Review_, The, 211

Humanitarian League, established, 121-123;
closed, 211

Hyndman, H. M., 30, 79, 108 (note)

Inge, Very Rev. W. R., 70 (note), 214, 215

Ingram, John Kells, 111, 112

Japp, A. H., 118

Jefferies, Richard, 115, 116, 130

Johnson (Cory), William, 24, 25, 92;
quoted, 232

Joynes, Rev. J. L., 105, 106

Joynes, J. L, _jun._, 58

Jupp, W. J., 76

Kennedy, Admiral Sir W., 138

Kennedy, Dr. Benjamin, 43, 44

Kennedy, W. S., 115

Kropotkin, Prince, 183, 184

Latin Verses at Eton, 26, 27

Lester, H. F., 148

Linton, W. J., 111

Loti, Pierre, quoted, 244, 245

Lowell, J. R., 52;
quoted, 180

Lucretius, quoted, 91, 232

Lyttelton, Dr. Edward, 23 (note), 63, 66, 176

Macaulay, G. C., 20 (note), 28, 29, 42

Macdonald, J. F., his dream, 226

Macdonald, John, 151

Maitland, Edward, 122-124

Marx, Eleanor, 81, 90

Massey, Gerald, 111

Maurice, Rev. F. D., 44, 45, 47

Melville, Herman, 69, 110, 112

Meredith, George, 102, 107-110, 203;
quoted, 65

Miller, Joaquin, 112

Missionary zeal, at Eton, 55, 176;
at Cambridge, 48

Monck, W. H. S. (“Lex”), 140, 141

Moore, George, on Humanitarianism, 184

Moore, J. Howard, 130, 132-134, 200;
quoted, 64 (note), 244

Morris, William, 52, 61, 79, 80

Morrison, Dr. W. D., 140

Moultrie, John, 17, 18

Mountain scenery, desecration of, 185-199

“Murderous Millinery,” 166

Names, importance of, 129, 166, 239, 240

Newman, Francis W., 63, 68, 116, 123, 201

Noel, Hon. Roden, 113

Okes, Dr., Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, 36, 37, 41

Olivier, Sir Sydney, 81, 210
“Ouida,” 207

Parke, Ernest, 152

Paul, C. Kegan, 18, 68, 92

Paul, Herbert W., 28, 30

Peabody, Philip G., 214

Pig-killing, 78

Reclus, Elisée, 204, 205

Religion, its attitude towards Humaneness, 212-216

Renton, Chief Justice, his error in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, 137

Ricketson, Daniel, 114

Ricketson, Walton, 118

Riley, W. Harrison, 61, 62, 190

Ritchie, D. G., 70, 125, 126

Rossetti, W. M., 83, 95, 96, 99, 102

Ruskin, John, 52, 61, 62, 190, 191;
on Tennyson, 62

Sanborn, F. B., 114

Savages, in what sense, 8-10

Schopenhauer, quoted, 122, 245

Selous, Edmund, 164

Selous, F. C., on the Eton Hare-hunt, 155

Selwyn, Dr. E. C., 28-30, 43, 154

Selwyn, Dr. G. A., Bishop of Lichfield, 30, 33-35, 185, 186

Sharp, William, 102, 103

Shaw, G. Bernard, 61, 75, 80, 82, 83, 88, 93, 95,
98, 109, 113, 151, 166, 174, 210

Shelley, Lady, 92, 93

Shelley, P. B., 90-93, 99, 100

Shelley Society, 91, 93-98

Shilleto, R., 39, 43

Shuckburgh, E. S., 57

Simplification of Life, 73, 75-78

Slaughter-house barbarities, 9, 148-150

Smith, Professor Goldwin, 210

Snake-Feeding in Zoological Gardens, 164, 165

Socialism, 61, 73, 79, 80;
Dr. Warre on, 65

Solomon, on the rod, Butlerized, 137

Spencer, Herbert, 202

Stag-hunting, 152-154, 170

Stephen, Sir Leslie, 70, 91

Stewart, Hon. FitzRoy, 160, 161

“Stiggins,” 25, 26

Stillman, W. J., 209

Stratton, Rev. J., 124, 157, 158

“Swage,” 21

Swinburne, A. C., 102-107

Symonds, J. A., 112, 113

Tait, Professor Lawson, 144, 145

Tallack, William, 142, 143

Telemachus, the Martyr, 213

Thompson, Dr., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, 41

Thomson, James (“B.V.”), 101-104, 237

Thoreau, H. D., 73, 76, 78, 114, 115, 118, 122;
quoted, 77

Tolstoy, Count, 79, 204, 205

Tovey, D. C., 57

Trine, R. W., 209, 210

Vaughan, Mgr. J. S., 126

Vegetarianism, at Eton, 62-64, 68

Veresaeff, V., his _Confessions of a Physician_, 147

Vivisection, 12, 127, 146-148

Wallace, Alfred R., 202

Warre, Dr. E., Headmaster of Eton, 59, 60, 65, 97, 154

Watts, G. F., 204

Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 102, 104-106, 108, 129

Welldon, Rt. Rev. J. E. C., 28-30

West, William, his portrait of Shelley, 99, 100

Wilde, Oscar, 86, 181, 182

Williams, Howard, 63, 122, 124, 146

Zoological Gardens, 163, 164;
piety at the Reptile House, 165

* * * * *

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_Works by Henry S. Salt_

=The Flogging Craze= A Statement of the Case against Corporal Punishment

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] In an article published in _Macmillan’s Magazine_, December 1887, I dealt with the subject of Moultrie’s Poems.

[2] Article on “Eton as it is,” in the _Adventurer_, No. 23, by “E. G. R.” (G. C. Macaulay).

[3] Dr. Lyttelton, when Headmaster of Eton, substituted the cane for the birch in the Upper School.

[4] From the chapter on “The Author of Ionica,” in _Eton under Hornby_.

[5] See Brinsley Richards’s _Seven Years at Eton_.

[6] The article, unsigned, appeared in No. 23.

[7] The _Adventurer_, No. 20.

[8] See the concluding article, “Valete Etonenses,” No. 29.

[9] The incident is a good example of the way in which the _real_ ethics of diet are often overlooked, while stress is laid upon some quite minor and subordinate aspect of it.

[10] I was not aware of these lines having appeared in print, until they were quoted by Sir Edward Cook in his _More Literary Recreations_, 1919. My version of them is slightly different from his; but I think my recollection is trustworthy.

[11] _My Days and Dreams_, by Edward Carpenter, 1916.

[12] The two years allowed for vegetarianism have now become forty, and all of them years of hard work.

[13] “Our competitive system of industry is a vestigial institution. It is a survival from the militant ages of the past.... It is a system of cannibalism. Instead of instilling the feeling of brotherhood, it compels us to eat each other.”--_Savage Survivals_, by J. Howard Moore, 1916.

[14] Since the above was written, Dean Inge has added his name to the illustrious list. Is it not time, by the way, that some one collected the Gloomy Dean’s golden sayings in a volume--under the title of _Ingots_, perhaps?

[15] Article on “The Bringing of Sentient Beings into Existence,” the _Ethical World_, May 7, 1898.

[16] _Pall Mall Gazette_, April 28, 1888.

[17] _Farnham Herald_, September 16, 1899.

[18] _Wayfarings_: a Record of Adventure and Liberation in the Life of the Spirit, 1918.

[19] _The Academy_, October 15, 1898.

[20] The substance of what is here said about Francis Adams is taken from my editorial note to the revised edition of the _Songs of the Army of the Night_, published by Mr. A. C. Fifield, 1910.

[21] _De Rerum Naturâ_, iii. 9-13, as translated in _Treasures of Lucretius_.

[22] It is significant that the title of Edward Carpenter’s lines to Shelley: “To a Dead Poet,” became, in later editions of _Towards Democracy_, “To One who is where the Eternal are.”

[23] _Sonnet to Shelley_, by N. Douglas Deuchar.

[24] From a letter on “Swinburne at Eton,” _Times Literary Supplement_, December 25, 1919.

[25] The assertion made in Mr. H. M. Hyndman’s _Records of an Adventurous Life_ (1911) that Meredith’s vegetarianism was “almost the death of him,” and that he himself “recognized the truth,” viz. that flesh food is a necessity for those who work with mind as well as body, is directly at variance with what Meredith himself told me twenty years nearer the date of the experiment in question.

[26] Here perhaps I had better say that my own work for the League, though mostly private and anonymous, was continuous during the twenty-nine years of the League’s existence; so that in describing the various aspects of the movement I am writing of what I know. The opinions expressed are, of course, only personal, as in the remarks about the war (Chap. XV).

[27] _Daily News_, April 10, 1906.

[28] _Daily News_, June 6, 1908.

[29] _The Times_, December 11 and 26, 1902.

[30]

Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
_Hudibras_, Part II, canto 1, 844.

[31] Mr. J. F. P. Rawlinson, in the House of Commons, November 1, 1912.

[32] London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.

[33] _The Confessions of a Physician_, translated by Simeon Linden, pp. 158, 159.

[34] A Member of Parliament who had charge of a Sports Bill once begged us not to get the Buckhounds abolished, because, as he said, they were the great incentive to vote for the Bill.

[35] See Dickens’s description, Forster’s _Life of Dickens_, iii. 146.

[36] Some years later I was enabled, by the courtesy of the owner, to visit the top of Kinderscout on a frosty afternoon in December, when it had the appearance of a great snow-clad table-land, intersected by deep ruts, and punctuated here and there by the black masonry of the tors.

[37] I have here incorporated the substance of a letter on “The Preservation of Mountain Scenery” published in _The Times_, April 28, 1908.

[38] _North Wales Weekly News_, May 15, 1908.

[39] _On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills._

[40] Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, 1916; Watts & Co., London, 1918.

[41] See the address on “War and Sublimation,” given by Dr. L. Jones, in the subsection of Psychology, at the meetings of the British Association, September 11, 1915. In war, he pointed out, impulses were noticed which apparently did not exist in peace, except in the criminal classes. Primitive tendencies never disappeared from existence; they only vanished from view by being repressed and buried in the unconscious mind.

[42] _Cf._ Mr. Edward Garnett’s _Papa’s War, and Other Satires_, George Allen & Unwin, Ld., 1918.

[43] “We were told that the war was to end war, but it was not: it did not and it could not.” So said Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, May 18, 1920; at which date it was no longer necessary to keep up the illusion.

[44] If any doubt existed as to the national insensibility caused by the war, it must have been dispelled by the comparative indifference with which the news of the Amritsar massacre--a more terrible atrocity than any for which German commanders were responsible--was received in this country.

[45] _De Rerum Naturâ_, iii, 847-850, as translated in _Treasures of Lucretius_.

[46] _Civilization_, by George Duhamel. Translated by T. P. Conwil-Evans.

[47] I heard a Derbyshire gamekeeper actually quote “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord,” as if it were an injunction to the righteous to follow the example of a vengeful Deity.

[48] _The Basis of Morality._ Translated by Arthur Brodrick Bullock, 1903 (George Allen and Unwin, Ltd.).

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

for how then would be obtain=> for how then would he obtain {pg 184}

the London and North-Western Railway at Llanber i England=> the London and North-Western Railway at Llanberis England {pg 195}

End of Project Gutenberg's Seventy Years Among Savages, by Henry Stephens Salt