importance, we from the first refused to yield, and made it plain that
it was no battle of words in which we were engaged but one of ethical
conduct, and that while we were quite willing to exchange the term
“rights” for a better one, if better could be found, we would not allow
the concept either of human “duties” or of animals’ “rights” to be
manipulated in the manner of which Mr. Ritchie’s book gave a conspicuous
example. Meanwhile the word “rights” held the field.
The old Catholic school was, of course, antagonistic to the recognition
of animals’ rights, and we had controversies with Monsignor John S.
Vaughan, among other sacerdotalist writers, when he laid down the
ancient proposition that “beasts exist for the use and benefit of man.”
It may be doubted whether argument is not a pure waste of time, when
there is a fundamental difference of opinion as to data and principles:
the sole reason for such debate was to ensure that the humanitarian view
of the question was rightly placed before the public, and to show how
strange was the alliance between sacerdotalist and vivisector.
Evolutionary science has demonstrated beyond question the kinship of all
sentient life; yet the scientist, in order to rake together a moral
defence for his doings, condescends to take shelter under the same plea
as the theologian, and having got rid of the old anthropocentric fallacy
in the realm of science avails himself of that fallacy in the realm of
ethics: a progressive in one branch of thought, he is still a
medievalist in another.
Thus scientist and sacerdotalist between them would perpetuate the
experimental tortures of the laboratory. _Laborare est orare_ was the
old saying; now it should be expanded by the Catholic school of
vivisectionists into _laboratorium est oratorium_: the house of torture
is the house of prayer. It is a beautiful and touching scene of
reconciliation, this meeting of priest and professor over the
torture-trough of the helpless animal. They might exclaim in Tennyson’s
words:
There above the little grave,
O there above the little grave,
We kissed again with tears.
More exhilarating was the discussion when Mr. G. K. Chesterton entered
the lists as champion of those high prerogatives of Mankind, which he
saw threatened by the sinister devices of humanitarians, who, as he has
explained in one of his books, “uphold the claims of all creatures
against those of humanity.” A debate with Mr. Chesterton took place in
the Essex Hall; and for several years afterwards the argument was
renewed at times, as, for instance, when reviewing a book of mine on
_The Logic of Vegetarianism_, he insisted[27] that “the difference
between our moral relation to men and to animals is not a difference of
degree in the least: it is a difference of kind.” The human race, he
held, is a definite society, different from everything else. “The man
who breaks a cat’s back breaks a cat’s back. The man who breaks a man’s
back breaks an implied treaty.” To us, this terse saying of Mr.
Chesterton’s seemed to contain unintentionally the root of all cruelty
to animals, the quintessence of anthropocentric arrogance. The man who
breaks a cat’s back, breaks a cat’s back. Yes, and the scientist who
vivisects a dog, vivisects a dog; the sportsman who breaks up a hare,
breaks up a hare. That is all. The victims are not human. But it is a
distinction which has caused, in savage hands, the immemorial ill-usage
of the lower animals through the length and breadth of the world.
Perhaps the strangest of Mr. Chesterton’s charges against humanitarians
was one which he made in his book _Orthodoxy_, that their trend is “to
touch fewer and fewer things,” i.e. to abstain from one action after
another until they are left in a merely negative position. He failed to
see that while we certainly desire to touch fewer and fewer things with
whip, hob-nailed boot, hunting-knife, scalpel, or pole-axe, we equally
desire to get into touch with more and more of our fellow-beings by
means of that sympathetic intelligence which tells us that they are
closely akin to ourselves. Why, ultimately, do we object to such
practices as vivisection, blood-sports, and butchery? Because of the
cruelty inseparable from them, no doubt; but also because of the hateful
narrowing of our own human pleasures which these barbarous customs
involve. A recognition of the rights of animals implies no sort of
disparagement of human rights: this indeed was clearly indicated in the
sub-title of my book, _Animals’ Rights_ “considered in relation to
social progress.”
During the winter of 1895-96, a course of lectures on “Rights,” as
viewed from various standpoints--Christian, ethical, secularist,
scientific, theosophical, and humanitarian--was organized by the
Humanitarian League; and of these perhaps the most significant was Mr.
Frederic Harrison’s address on the ethical view, in which it was
maintained that “man’s morality towards the lower animals is a vital
and indeed fundamental part of his morality towards his fellow-men.” At
this same meeting some discussion arose on the far from unimportant
question of nomenclature, objection being taken to Mr. Harrison’s use of
the term “brute,” which he, on his part, defended as being
scientifically correct, and, in the sense of “inarticulate,” wholly void
of offence, even when applied to such highly intelligent beings as the
elephant, the horse, or the dog. Humanitarians, however, have generally
held that the meaning of the word “brute,” in this connection, is not
“inarticulate” but “irrational,” and that for this reason it should be
discarded, on the ground that to call an animal a brute, or irrational,
is the first step on the path to treating him accordingly. “Give a dog a
bad name,” says the proverb; and directly follows the injunction: “and
hang him.”
For like reasons the Humanitarian League always looked with disfavour on
the expression “dumb animals,” because, to begin with, animals are not
dumb, and secondly, nothing more surely tends to their depreciation than
thus to attribute to them an unreal deficiency or imperfection: such a
term may be meant to increase our pity, but in the long run it lessens
what is more important, our respect. In this matter the League was glad
to have the support of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, who, as long ago as
1877, had written satirically in the _Athenæum_ of what he called “the
great human fallacy” conveyed in the words “the dumb animals,” and had
pointed out that animals are no more dumb than men are. Years afterwards
he wrote to me to inquire about the authorship of an article in the
_Humanitarian_ in which the same conclusion was reached, and expressed
his full sympathy with our point of view.
But much more difficult to contend with than any anti-humanitarian
arguments is the dull dead weight of that unreasoning prejudice which
cannot see consanguinity except in the conventional forms, and simply
does not comprehend the statement that “the animals” are our
fellow-beings. There are numbers of good and kindly folk with whom, on
this question, one never reaches the point of difference at all, but is
involved in impenetrable misapprehensions: there may be talking on
either side, but communication there is none. Tell them, in Howard
Moore’s words, that the non-human beings are “not conveniences but
cousins,” and they will answer, assentingly, that they are all in favour
of “kindness to animals”; after which they will continue to treat them
not as cousins but as conveniences. This impossibility of even making
oneself intelligible was brought home to me with great force, some years
ago, in connection with the death of a very dear friend, a cat, whose
long life of fifteen years had to be ended in the chloroform-box owing
to an incurable ailment. The veterinary surgeon whose aid I invoked was
an extremely kind man, for whose skill I shall always feel grateful; and
from his patience and sympathetic manner I thought he partly understood
what the occasion meant to me--that, like a human death-bed, it was a
scene that could never pass from the mind. It was, therefore, with
something of an amused shock that I recollected, after he had gone, what
I had hardly noticed at the moment, that he had said to me, as he left
the door: “You’ll be wanting a new pussy-cat soon.”
Richard Jefferies has remarked that the belief that animals are devoid
of reason is rarely held by those who themselves labour in the fields:
“It is the cabinet-thinkers who construct a universe of automatons.” One
is cheered now and then by hearing animals spoken of, quite simply and
naturally, as rational beings. I once made the acquaintance, in the Lake
District, of an old lady living in a roadside cottage, who had for her
companion, sitting in an armchair by the fire, a lame hen, named Tetty,
whom she had saved and reared from chicken-hood. Some years later, as I
passed that way, I called and inquired after Tetty, but learnt that she
was dead. “Ah, poor Tetty!” said the dame, as tears fell from her eyes;
“she passed away several months ago, quite conscious to the end.” That
to attribute to a dying bird the self-consciousness which is supposed to
be the special prerogative of mankind, should, to the great majority of
persons, appear nothing less than comical, is a measure of the width of
that gulf which religion has delved between “the beasts that perish” and
the Christian with his “soul” to save.
But it is not often that one hears of a case like that of Tetty: as a
rule, disappointment lurks in the hopes that flatter the humanitarian
mind. We had a neighbour in Surrey, an old woman living in an adjoining
cottage, who professed full adherence to our doctrine that cats should
not be allowed to torture captured birds. “I always take them away from
my cat: I can’t bear to see them suffering,” she said. We warmly
approved of this admirable sentiment. But then, as she turned aside, she
added quietly: “Unless, of course, they’re sparrows.”
A year or two ago the papers described a singular accident at a railway
station, where a cow got on the line and was wedged between the platform
and a moving train: the cow, we were told, was killed, “but fortunately
there was no personal injury”--a view of the occurrence which seemed, to
a humanitarian, still stranger than the accident itself.
Here, again, is an instance of unintended humour: “Homeward Bound” as
the title of a cheerful picture in which a bronzed sailor is represented
returning from the tropics, carrying--a caged parrot.
It is this traditional habit of regarding the lower animals not as
persons and fellow-beings, but as automata and “things,” that lies
behind the determined refusal to recognize that they have rights, and is
thus ultimately responsible for much of the callousness with which they
are treated. With this superstition the League was in conflict from the
first.
But perhaps some of my readers may still think that time spent on the
rights of animals is so much taken away from the great human interests
that are at stake. Let us help men first, they may argue, and then, when
mankind is righted, we can help the animals after. On the other hand,
there are some zoophilists who take the contrary view that men can help
themselves, and that it is the animals first and foremost who need aid
and protection. The League’s opinion was that both these arguments are
mistaken, and, for the same reason, viz. that, in our complex modern
society, all great issues of justice or injustice are crossed and
intermingled, so that no one cruelty can be singled out as the source of
all other cruelties, nor can any one reform be fully realized apart from
the rest. By “humanitarian” we meant one who feels and acts humanely,
not towards mankind only, or the lower animals only, but towards all
sentient life--one who adopts the Humanitarian League’s principle that
“it is iniquitous to inflict avoidable suffering on any sentient being.”
We did not regard as humanitarians, for example, those “philanthropic”
persons who, having made a fortune by commercial competition, in which
the depreciation of wages was a recognized method, afterwards gave back
a portion of their wealth in “charity.” This might, perhaps, be
philanthropy, but it did not seem to be quite humanity. Nor did we think
that the name “humanitarian” should be given to those zoophilists or
animal lovers who keep useless and pampered animals as pets and
playthings, wasting on them time and money which might be better spent
elsewhere, and indeed wasting the lives of the animals themselves, for
animals have their own lives to live as men have.
Perhaps the most able of all vindications of humane principles is that
contained in Mr. Howard Moore’s _The Universal Kinship_, published by
the League in 1906. It was through a notice which I wrote in the
_Humanitarian_ of an earlier book of his, _Better-World Philosophy_,
that the League first came into association with him; and I remember
with shame that when that “sociological synthesis,” as its sub-title
proclaimed it to be, first came into my hands, I nearly left it unread,
suspecting it to be but the latest of the many wearisome ethical
treatises that are a scourge to the reviewer, to whom the very word
“sociology” or “synthesis” is a terror. But fortunately I read the book,
and quickly discovered its merits; and from that time, till his death in
1916, Howard Moore was one of the truest and tenderest of our friends,
himself prone to despondency and, as his books show, with a touch of
pessimism, yet never failing in his support and encouragement of others
and of all humanitarian effort. “What on earth would we Unusuals do, in
this lonely dream of life,” so he wrote in one of his letters, “if it
were not for the sympathy and friendship of the Few?”
Howard Moore died by his own hand (he had good reason for his action);
and the timorous attitude which so many people adopt towards suicide was
shown in the silence on this point which was maintained in most of the
English zoophilist journals which mentioned his death: one editor hit
upon the sagacious announcement that “he died very suddenly,” which
deserves, I think, to be noted as a consummate instance of how the truth
may be truthfully obscured.
In _The Universal Kinship_, Howard Moore left to humanitarians a
treasure which it will be their own fault if they do not value as it
deserves. There is a tendency to forget that it is to modern
evolutionary science that the ethic of humaneness owes its strongest
corroboration. The physical basis of the humane philosophy rests on the
biological fact that kinship is universal. Starting from this admitted
truth, Moore showed, with much wealth of argument and epigram, that the
supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human has no more
existence, apart from the imagination of man, than the physical gulf
which has now been bridged by science. The purpose of our movement was
admirably stated by him: “to put science and humanitarianism in place of
tradition and savagery.” It was with that aim in view that our League of
Humaneness had been formed.
X
TWENTIETH-CENTURY TORTURES
Why not bring back at once the boot, the stake, and the
thumbscrew?--PROFESSOR LAWSON TAIT.
It is among the proudest boasts of this country that torture is not
permitted within its borders: “Torture,” wrote Macaulay, “was inflicted
for the last time in the month of May, 1640.” But pleasant though it is
to think that it was in the beautiful springtime that the barbarous
practice came to an end, this is unfortunately one of the cases in which
our people allow themselves to be beguiled and fooled by very
transparent quibbles; for a few minutes’ thought would suffice to
convince the most complacent of Britons that while some specialized
forms of judicial torture have been abandoned, other tortures, some of
them not less painful and fully as repulsive, are being inflicted to
this day--nearly three hundred years after the glorious date of
abolition. For if “torture,” as etymology and the dictionaries and
common usage tell us, means nothing more or less than the forcible
infliction of extreme pain, it is not a technicality but an absurdity to
pretend that it finds no place among twentieth-century institutions.
Flogging is torture in a most literal sense, and in one of its grossest
shapes: the “cat,” as Mr. G. K. Chesterton has well said, is “the rack
without any of its intellectual reasons.”[28] The horror of the old
naval and military lashings is within the memory of many officers who
were compelled to witness them: how is the punishment any less savage in
its nature because it is now administered in a less severe degree, and
on men convicted of robbery with violence or some breach of prison
discipline? In one of the Parliamentary debates of November, 1912, a
Member who had been invited by the Home Secretary to examine the “cat,”
gave it as his opinion that “if _that_ is not torture, then I do not
know what torture is.”
In the gloomiest but most impressive of his stories, _The Island of Dr.
Moreau_, Mr. H. G. Wells has represented his savage “beast-folk” as
monotonously chanting a certain “idiotic formula” about the
infallibility of “the Law.” With nothing more fitly than with this can
be compared the undying legend, now over half a century old, that
“garrotting was put down by the lash.” It is not often that a popular
fallacy, however erroneous it may be, can be actually disproved; but in
this particular case such refutation was possible, in the certified fact
that the garrotting “epidemic” of 1862 had been suppressed by the
ordinary law _before_ flogging for that offence was legalized. For many
years the Humanitarian League issued a public challenge on the subject,
and made the facts known in thousands of press letters; the challenge
was quietly ignored, and the false statement repeated, till it was plain
that, as De Quincey remarked, “rarer than the phœnix is that virtuous
man who will consent to lose a prosperous story on the consideration
that it happens to be a lie.” One such virtuous man, however, and one
only, was found, namely, Mr. Montague Crackanthorpe, who actually
recanted the statement which he could not substantiate.[29] In view of
his unique candour, it was suggested after his death that a statue
should be erected to his memory.
Very different from the course taken by Mr. Crackanthorpe was the
action of Sir Alexander Wood Renton, of the Supreme Court of Ceylon,
who, in an article on “Corporal Punishment,” introduced into the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ of 1910 that very garrotting legend from which
it had previously been kept free, and made the further mistake of giving
the date of the Flogging Act of 1863 as 1861, thus lending to his
blunder a misleading appearance of plausibility. When called to account,
he was content to maintain a masterly silence--more eloquent than
words--and to allow his misstatement, unacknowledged and uncorrected, to
continue to keep alive a prevalent superstition. Can it be wondered that
such fallacies persist, when a Chief Justice will thus lie low rather
than admit himself at fault?
It is an amusing fact, and far too little known, that the text which has
long lent a sanctity to the use of corporal punishment, is not taken, as
supposed, from the _Proverbs_ of Solomon, but from a passage, and a
rather unseemly one, in Butler’s _Hudibras_ (1663):[30] this, however,
is as it should be, for it is fitting that an indecent practice should
claim authority from an indecent source. Thus encouraged, and with this
divine precept in their thoughts, parents and schoolmasters, and
magistrates, and judges, and all governors and rulers, have felt that in
wielding the rod they were discharging a religious obligation, and not,
as might otherwise have been suspected, gratifying some very primitive
instincts of their own. For “the Wisdom of Solomon” has been quoted as
our guide, in the correction of the old as well as of the young; indeed,
as a writer in the _People_ sagely remarked, “the older the evildoer,
the more his need of the birch.” On this principle, aged vagrants have
on various occasions been sentenced to be corrected with the rod; but
it is to the young that the blessings of the birch more properly
belong.
Our British boys, from shore to shore,
Two priceless boons may find:
The Flag that’s ever waved before,
The Birch that’s waved behind.
In its campaign against flogging in the Royal Navy, the Humanitarian
League gained not only a considerable success, but an amount of
entertainment which of itself would have more than repaid the labour
expended on the work. To begin with, there was the technical quibble,
very characteristic of officialdom, that though the backs of boys, or
rather of young men, might be cut into ribbons with the birch, there was
no “flogging” in the Navy, for “flogging” meant the infliction not of
the birch but of the “cat.” With Mr. Swift MacNeill conducting the
attack in the House of Commons, it may be imagined that such
prevarications--and there were many similar instances--fared but badly;
and it was no surprise when “these degrading practices,” as Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman described them, were brought to an end in 1906,
though the use of the cane, to the discredit of the Admiralty, is still
permitted and defended.
In this long controversy the League was brought into conflict with all
sorts of opponents, among them several Admirals, of whom the “breeziest”
were the Hon. V. A. Montagu and Sir William Kennedy. With the latter
especially we had great fun, as we found in him an antagonist of the
utmost heartiness and good humour. “Of what use is it,” he wrote to me,
“sending me all this rubbish, except to fill the waste-paper basket? I
don’t care a damn for Admiral----’s opinion.” On another occasion he
sent me a formal challenge to meet him “at any time and place, when
pistols and coffee will be provided.” At a later date we had his
support, equally emphatic, in our protest against the practice of
feeding snakes on live prey at the “Zoo.”
Other friends, too, helped to lend gaiety to a rather dismal subject.
Among those who actively co-operated with the League was a commercial
traveller, who was deeply versed in the various laws relating to
corporal punishment, and who, as he once confided to me, had been in the
habit of working locally as a sort of freelance and Bashi-Bazouk. He had
made a practice, for example, of writing “How about the Birch?” on the
Admiralty’s printed notices in which boys were invited to reap the
benefits of joining the Navy; and this had touched so sore a point that
the advertisements in question had at length been put within glass
frames. Another of his little jokes was to write to private
schoolmasters, saying that he had a son whom he was about to send to
school (which was true), and asking whether they could guarantee that
there would be no corporal punishment. Several masters responded
favourably, but as the boy could not be sent to more than one place of
education, these worthy folk were deprived of their _quid pro quo_; in
the end, however, a nemesis fell upon their betrayer, for once, when he
had just returned home after a long journey, tired, and wanting above
everything his tea, who should be announced but one of those very
pedagogues with whom he had been in communication. He too had travelled
some distance, rather than miss the chance of a pupil, and, having
“ideas” on the subject of corporal punishment, had come, as he said, for
“a good talk.” “I could have eaten him,” was our friend’s remark.