of the Royal Hunt trying to exploit the visit of the German Emperor, in
1899, in order to bolster up the failing reputation of their sport. They
were very anxious that a “meet” of the Buckhounds should be one of the
entertainments provided for the Kaiser, and on November 24th, in
expectation of his being present, an unusually large company assembled;
but the Humanitarian League had been beforehand in the matter, a letter
of protest which it had addressed to the Prince of Wales had the desired
effect, and the Kaiser had an engagement elsewhere. Had he been present,
he would, as it happened, have seen a deer staked and done to death in
the manner which was far from uncommon, and he would have learnt (if he
had any doubt on the subject) that “Huns” are not entirely confined to
Germany.
This rascally “sport,” though no longer a State institution, is still
carried on by private packs in several parts of the country, and nothing
but fresh legislation can prevent its continuance. A “Spurious Sports
Bill” drafted by the Humanitarian League, with the purpose of
prohibiting the hunting of carted stags, the coursing of bagged rabbits,
and the shooting of birds released from traps, has been introduced at
various times in the House of Commons by Mr. A. C. Morton, Mr. H. F.
Luttrell, Sir William Byles, Sir George Greenwood, and other Members,
and in the House of Lords by the Bishop of Hereford (Dr. Percival); but
its opponents have always succeeded in preventing its becoming law. On
one occasion (1893) it was “talked out” by Sir Frederick Banbury, who
is renowned in the House as an anti-vivisectionist and friend of
animals. It is not only human beings who have to pray, at times, to be
delivered from their friends.
The Eton Beagles were another of the League’s most cherished “pegs,” and
displayed as useful an illustration of the hare-hunt as the Royal
Buckhounds of the deer-worry. Had humanitarians talked of the cruelty of
hare-hunting in general, little attention would have been paid to them;
but with concrete instances drawn from the leading public school, and
quoted in the words of the boys themselves as printed in the _Eton
College Chronicle_--a disgusting record of “blooded” hounds and of the
hare “broken up,” or crawling “deadbeat,” “absolutely stiff,” “so done
that she could not stand”--a great impression was made, and the
memorials presented to the headmaster or the Governing Body, asking for
the substitution of a drag-hunt (a form of sport which was formerly
popular at Eton and led to very good runs), received a large number of
very influential signatures, including that of the Visitor of Eton, the
late Bishop of Lincoln, Dr. E. L. Hicks. But public opinion counts for
very little at the school where ignorance is bliss; a far more important
consideration for Governing Bodies and headmasters is the opinion of Old
Etonians; indeed, it is doubtful whether a headmaster of Eton could even
retain his position if he were to decree the discontinuance of what Dr.
Warre described, with all due solemnity, as “an old Eton institution.”
So obvious was this that we were inspired to borrow the title of Gray’s
famous poem in an enlarged form, and to indite an “Ode on the
Exceedingly Distant Prospect of Humane Reform at Eton College.”
Dr. E. C. Selwyn, headmaster of Uppingham, wrote to me if he were made
headmaster of Eton, he would abolish the Beagles “at the earliest
opportunity.” Unfortunately he was not the successful candidate for the
post when Dr. Warre gave it up, or we might have seen some rare sport at
Eton, and a hue and cry more exciting than any hare-hunt. Dislike of
blood-sport as a school recreation is by no means confined to
humanitarians, as may be seen from the following sentence which I quote
from an interesting unpublished letter on the ethics of sport, addressed
to Mr. Stratton in 1905 by Mr. F. C. Selous, the great lion-hunter:
“After reading your pamphlet, I certainly think it would be better to
substitute drag-hunting for the pursuit and killing of a hare. To see
one of these animals worried and torn by a pack of dogs is not an
edifying sight for a young boy.”
All hunting, whether of the hare, fox, stag, or otter, has many horrible
features: perhaps the very nastiest is the custom of “blooding,” i.e.
baptizing with the blood of the mangled victim any children or young
folk who partake in the sport for the first time. The practice has been
described, but too modestly, it would seem, as “a hunting tradition
which goes back to the Middle Ages”; one would suppose it went back to
still more primitive times. Yet to this day this savage ritual is
patronized by our nobility and by royalty. “Prince Henry was blooded,”
was the conclusion of a newspaper report of a “kill” with a pack of
fox-hounds, January 9, 1920. There is a double significance, it seems,
in the expression “a prince of the blood.”
“You can’t eliminate cruelty from sport,” says a distinguished
sportsman, the Earl of Warwick, in his _Memories of Sixty Years_. In no
form of blood-sport do we more clearly see what a veritable mania this
amateur butchery may become than in one of Lord Warwick’s hobbies, “big
game hunting,” the difficult and costly pursuit of wild animals in
distant lands, for no better reason than the craze for killing.
Tiger-shooting is doubtless an exciting pastime, and there are savage
beasts that at times have to be destroyed; but what of that other tiger
that lurks in the heart of each of us? and how is _he_ going to be
eliminated, so long as a savage lust for killing is a recognized form of
amusement? For in spite of all the barriers and divisions that prejudice
and superstition have heaped up between the human and the non-human, we
may take it as certain that, in the long run, as we treat out
fellow-beings, “the animals,” so shall we treat our fellow-men.
Every one knows how the possessors of such “trophies” as the heads and
horns of “big game” love to decorate their halls with these mementoes of
the chase. I was once a visitor at a house which was not only adorned in
this way, but contained also a human head that had been sent home by a
member of a certain African expedition and “preserved” by the skill of
the taxidermist. When I was invited by the owner of the head--the
_second_ owner--to see that particular trophy, it was with some
misgivings that I acquiesced; but when, after passing up a staircase
between walls plastered with portions of the carcases of elephant,
rhinoceros, antelope, etc., I came to a landing where, under a glass
case, was the head of a pleasant-looking young negro, I felt no special
repugnance at the sight. It was simply a part--and, as it seemed, not a
peculiarly dreadful or loathsome part--of the surrounding dead-house;
and I understood how mankind itself may be nothing more than “big game”
to our soldier-sportsmen abroad. The absolute distinction between human
and non-human is a fiction which will not bear the test either of
searching thought in the study or of rough experience in the wilds.
Iniquitous as the Game Laws are, I have often thought it strange that
Kingsley, even when regarding them, quite justly, from the poacher’s
standpoint, should have hurled at the game-preserver that eloquent
denunciation:
There’s blood on the game you sell, squire,
And there’s blood on the game you eat.
without in the least realizing the full truth of the statement. For
there, literally, is blood on the “game” which the squire (or the
poacher) disposes of, viz. the blood of the “game” itself; and that
Kingsley should have forgotten this, is a singular proof of the way in
which the lower animals are regarded as mere goods and chattels, and not
as creatures of flesh and blood at all--except to cook and eat. The very
use of the word “game,” in this sense, is most significant.
As mention has been made of the fall of the Royal Buckhounds, a few
words must be said of the man who chiefly brought it about. The Rev. J.
Stratton was Master of Lucas’s Hospital, Wokingham, a charitable
institution founded in 1663, where a number of aged labourers live as
pensioners; and as Wokingham lay in the centre of the hunting district,
he was well placed for observing what went on, and for obtaining exact
information: he had, moreover, a first-hand knowledge of “sport,” and
his detestation of it was based on his own earlier experiences, as well
as on a keen sense of fair play. Of all the active workers with whom I
have been privileged to be associated, Mr. Stratton was the finest; I
have known nothing more courageous than the way in which, almost
single-handed at first, and with the whole hunting fraternity against
him, he gradually “pulled down” (to use a pleasant sporting term) the
cruel and stupid institution which was carried on in the Sovereign’s
name and at the expense of the public.
In character, as in appearance, Mr. Stratton was a Roman; his stern and
unswerving rectitude made him respected even by his most active
opponents. His outspokenness, where matters of real import were at
stake, was quite undaunted, and to an extent which sometimes caused
consternation among the weaker brethren. I was once asked by a
sympathetic bishop whether it would be possible “to keep Mr. Stratton
quiet.” More than one dignitary of the Church must have mused on that
problem; for if Mr. Stratton had a weakness, it was for a bishop. I do
not mean that he viewed bishops with undue reverence, somewhat the
reverse, for he loved to take a bishop to task; and some of his letters
to bishops, in reference to their sanction of vivisection or
blood-sports, were of a nature to cause a mild surprise in episcopal
circles. But if bishops did not always appreciate Mr. Stratton, other
persons did. So well did the birds in his garden at Wokingham understand
him, that they would let him talk to them and stroke them as they sat on
their nests. Could there be a more convincing proof of a man’s goodness?
Another active champion of the reform of blood-sports was Colonel W. L.
B. Coulson, a well-known Northumberland country gentleman and J.P., who
was one of the first men of influence to join the Humanitarian League.
He possessed a fine military presence, and a voice which, even at its
whisper, had a volume and resonance which could not fail to make it
heard to the uttermost corner of a room; his appearance, in brief, had
so little of the pale cast of thought that on the occasion when he first
met us we were the victims of an odd misapprehension. It had been
arranged that he would preside at a public meeting in London, the first
we held, on the subject of deer-hunting; and when the members of our
Committee arrived, some time before the discussion began, we were
troubled to find thus early upon the scene a very large and powerfully
built man, whom, as he did not introduce himself, we imagined to be a
master of staghounds, or at least an opponent of formidable calibre,
come to intimidate us at the start. We were relieved when we discovered
him to be our missing chairman.
Colonel Coulson was very popular with his audiences, for there was a
frankness about him which went straight to the heart, and his speeches,
though not cultured, were full of raciness and humanity. Himself brought
up as a sportsman, he felt keenly about the sufferings of animals, and
after his retirement from the army devoted much time to lecturing-tours,
in which he visited many parts of the country and especially addressed
himself to schools. Eton would not receive him, doubtless fearing some
reference to her hare-hunt; but at several of the other big public
schools he was asked to speak more than once. Brave, simple, and
courteous, he was loved by all who knew him, and by none more than by
his colleagues in the humanitarian cause.
Nothing was more remarkable in the history of the Humanitarian League
than the diversity of character in the persons whom its principles
attracted. Lady Florence Dixie, who joined the League at its start in
1891, had a strange and adventurous career, and has been described, not
inaptly, as “a sort of ‘Admirable Crichton’ among women, a poet, a
novelist, an explorer, a war correspondent, a splendid horse-woman, a
convincing platform-speaker, a swimmer of great endurance, and as keen a
humanitarian as ever lived.” It was as humanitarian that I knew her; and
she was certainly one of the most faithful supporters of the League,
ever ready to help with pen or purse, and prompt, sincere, and
unwavering in her friendship. Her poems, of which she sent me more than
one volume, had little worth; but her essay on “The Horrors of Sport”
was one of the most vivid and moving appeals that have been written on
the subject; none of the League’s pamphlets had so wide a circulation,
for it has been read and quoted in every part of the English-speaking
world. She here wrote with full knowledge of the facts, and with a
sympathetic insight, which, together with a swift and picturesque style,
made her, at her best, a powerful and fascinating writer. Of her
personal eccentricities many reports were rife; and I remembered that
when I lived at Eton she used to be seen in the garden of her villa, on
the Windsor bank of the Thames, walking, like a modern Circe, with a
number of wild beasts in her train. On one occasion a jaguar made his
escape from her control, and there was a mild panic in Windsor and Eton
till he was recaptured: it might have indeed been serious if the bold
youths who hunted the terror-stricken hare had started a quarry that
showed fight.
Another unfailing friend of the League’s Sports Committee was the Hon.
FitzRoy Stewart. When I first knew him he was Secretary of the Central
Conservative Office, and we were rather surprised at finding an ally in
that direction; in fact, we had some suspicions, entirely unjust, as the
result proved, that Mr. Stewart might be desirous of learning our plan
of campaign against the Royal Buckhounds in the interest of his sporting
friends. The first time I visited him at the Conservative headquarters I
was introduced to Sir Howard Vincent, M.P., who, though a patron of the
Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had not scrupled
to throw in his lot with those who were fighting for the continuance of
rabbit-coursing, pigeon-shooting and stag-hunting. He seemed to be a
good-natured, vacuous-minded person, and one of his remarks, I remember,
was that England is “a paradise for animals.” This was hardly the
opinion of FitzRoy Stewart, who was indefatigable with his schemes for
the prohibition of the more cruel forms of sport. He had great hopes of
young Mr. Winston Churchill, then beginning to be known as a rising star
of the Tory party, and at his earnest request a letter was sent to Mr.
Churchill from the office of the League, reminding him of Lord Randolph
Churchill’s strong denunciation of stag-hunting, and asking his aid
against the Buckhounds. Mr. Churchill, however, unmoved by this appeal
to his filial piety, sagely opined that the crusade against the Royal
Hunt was too democratic.
Mr. FitzRoy Stewart worked closely with the Humanitarian League till his
death in 1914; and many were his press letters which he and I jointly
composed at the office in Chancery Lane. He liked to come there armed
with some sheets of his Carlton Club notepaper, on which the letters,
when worded to his satisfaction, were duly copied and signed--“Old
Harrovian,” or “A Member of the Carlton Club,” was his favourite
signature--and then he sent them off to some influential editors of his
acquaintance, whose disgust would have been unmeasured had they known
what company their esteemed contributor had been keeping. Mr. Stewart, I
must in fairness add, though a strong opponent of blood-sport, was a
firm believer in the beneficence of flogging; but he was willing to sink
this one point of difference in his general approval of the League’s
work. So good-natured was he, that when the subject of corporal
punishment was going to crop up at a Committee meeting, he used to ask
me to put it first on the agenda, so that he might wait outside until
that burning question was disposed of: then he would join us--coming in
to dessert, as we expressed it--and take his share in the discussion.
Oh, if all colleagues were as reasonable! As _The Times_ truly said of
him, “his sweetness of temper and social tact made him the most
companionable of human beings.”
Mr. John Colam, for many years Secretary of the Royal Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was a well-known figure in the
zoophilist movement at the time of which I am speaking, and had a great
reputation for astuteness. Wily he certainly was, with the vast
experience he had acquired in evading the double pressure of those who
cried “forward” and of those who cried “back”; and he was a veritable
Proteus in the skill with which he gave the slip to any one who tried to
commit him to any course but the safest. He used privately to allege the
backwardness of his Committee as a cause for this seeming timidity; thus
he told me in 1901, when the fate of the Royal Buckhounds was hanging in
the balance, that the R.S.P.C.A. was unable to take any public action,
not from any remissness on his part, but because certain members of the
Committee were afraid of alienating subscribers, including King Edward
himself. Personally I liked Mr. Colam; he was humane so far as his
interests permitted, and when one had realized, once for all, the
uselessness of attempting to bind him to any fixed purpose, it was
instructive to have an occasional talk with him at Jermyn Street, and to
observe the great adroitness with which he conducted the affairs of the
Society; and he, on his part, when he saw that one had no longer any
ethical designs on him, but approached him rather as a fellow-student,
albeit a mere amateur, in the art of dealing with unreasonable people,
would become chatty and confidential and tell amusing stories of a
Secretary’s adventures. He would have made a successful Prime Minister,
for his “wizardry” was of the highest order; as a humanitarian he left
something to be desired.
With the Sporting League, which professed to discountenance
“malpractices” in sport, yet opposed the Bill which would have
prohibited rabbit-coursing and kindred pastimes, we were of course
involved in controversy. We sought to bring this to a point by proposing
a public discussion of the question: “What are malpractices in Sport?”
But this challenge was declined, the _Sportsman_ expressing the opinion
that “such piffling folly is best treated with contempt,” and the
_Evening News_ that “cackling is the strong point of the faddists.” We
were more successful in bringing to book some champions of aristocratic
blood-sports, among them Sir Herbert Maxwell and Sir Edward Grey, who on
one or two occasions appeared on neutral platforms, and seized the
opportunity to eulogize their own favourite recreations, but showed
little relish for the discussion which they themselves had provoked. Mr.
F. G. Aflalo was another of our many antagonists in the magazines and
the press; and I have a pleasant recollection of friendly encounters
with him in the _Fortnightly Review_ and elsewhere. Many other
apologists of blood-sports there were, of a more sentimental and
unreasoning kind, and with these, too, we much enjoyed the argument,
which was quite as good sport to us as their hunting or coursing was to
them.
Before passing from Sports to Fashions, I will speak briefly of those
popular places of recreation, known euphemistically as “Zoological
Gardens,” which in a civilized age would surely be execrated as among
the saddest and dullest spots on the earth, being, in fact, nothing
cheerier than big convict-stations, to which the ill-fated
life-prisoners--“stuff,” as the keepers call them--are conveyed from
many distant lands. How any rational person can find pleasure in seeing,
for example, “the lions fed” (the modern version of _Christianos ad
leones_) is a mystery that baffles thought. I have not been to the
London “Zoo” for a good many years; but when I knew it, the
incongruities of the place were so ludicrous as almost to obscure one’s
sense of its barbarity: the Tiger’s den, for instance, was labelled:
“Beware of pickpockets,” and the Eagle’s cage bore the inscription: “To
the Refreshment Rooms”; and there, sure enough, within sight of the
captive Bird of Jove moping disconsolate on his perch, was a waiter,
serving out coffees or lemon-squashes, regardless of the great Raptor by
whom his predecessor, Ganymede, had been carried off to be the god’s
cup-bearer. Could bathos have gone further?
A friend of mine who, as an Eton boy, used to go to the “Zoo” in the
holidays and amuse himself by teasing the captives, was converted to
humanitarian principles in a rather curious way. An elk, or some large
animal of the ruminant order, whose wrath he had deservedly incurred,
_coughed_ on him with such vehemence that he retired from the elk-house
covered with a sort of moist bran, and with his top-hat irrevocably
damaged. Though at the time this touched his hat rather than his heart,
he afterwards came to regard the incident as what is called a “means of
grace.” It caused _him_, too, to “ruminate,” and so brought home to him
the fact that an elk is “a person.”
A pamphlet of mine, issued by the Humanitarian League in 1895, entitled
“A Zoophilist at the Zoo,” was the beginning of an agitation which
gradually led to a considerable improvement in the housing of the
animals, in which discussion the most noteworthy feature was a series of
articles contributed to the _Saturday Review_ by Mr. Edmund Selous, and
afterwards reprinted by the League. Another subject, debated with much
liveliness, was the practice of feeding pythons and other large serpents
on living prey--ducks, fowls, rabbits, and even goats being given to the
reptiles, to be devoured in a manner which was sickening to witness and
almost too loathsome to describe.[35] These exhibitions were open till
1881; then for publicity extreme secrecy was substituted, and all
inquiries were met by the stereotyped statement that the use of live
prey was confined to cases “where such food was a necessity.”
Who feeds slim serpents must himself be slim.
The League found the reptile-feeders at Regent’s Park exceedingly
slippery to deal with, and it needed long time, and much patience, to
bring them to book. In this task, however, I was encouraged by the
recollection of a scene which I once witnessed in a crowded
railway-carriage, when a large eel had made its escape from a basket
which one of my fellow-travellers was holding, and created a mild panic
among the company by its convolutions under the seat. An old lady
sharply upbraided the owner of the eel, and I was struck by the
reasonableness of his reply in rather difficult circumstances, when the
eel had repeatedly slipped from his grasp. “Wait a little, mum,” he
said, “until he gets a bit dusty”; and the result proved the man to be
right. In like manner we waited till the excuses given by the Zoological
Society had become very dusty indeed.
Some of the reasons offered for the old system of snake-feeding were
themselves truly reptilian. “We follow God’s ordinances, and they must
be right,” was the reverent remark of a keeper; and humanitarians were
told that “to declare the use of live food to be cruel is to bring that
charge against the Designer of Nature Himself.” So deep and fervent was
the piety of the Reptile House! Nevertheless, we continued to urge our
point, and the subject was hotly debated at more than one of the
Zoological Society’s annual meetings, where, as a result of the protests
raised by Captain Alfred Carpenter, R.N., Mr. Stephen Coleridge, Mr.
Rowland Hunt, and other F.Z.S.’s, it was made evident that the majority
of the Fellows, who regarded the Society as a sort of private club, were
indignant at public opinion being brought to bear upon their concerns.
It was a situation not devoid of humour. I happen to know that in the
course of an excited meeting held in November, 1907, when the Duke of
Bedford, as President of the Zoological Society, was in the chair, the
following telegram was despatched to his Grace:
Beg you to stand firm for live food and maintain the ordinances of
the Creator.
_From_ ANNA CONDA.
This artless prayer of an unknown lady was fully in accord with the
spirit of the meeting. Nevertheless, things moved, even in Regent’s
Park; and, when we had shown that the snakes in the New York Zoological
Park were successfully fed on freshly-killed animals, we had the
satisfaction of seeing the same less barbarous method adopted at the
London “Zoo.”