menagerie from the wife of one of the keepers, a charwoman in the house
where I was staying, who was of a somewhat loquacious and communicative
disposition, the staple of her talk being the adventures of her husband,
Johnnie. “Johnnie came home dead-tired last night, sir,” she said on one
occasion. “Why was that, Mrs. Smith?” I asked. “Why, sir, he had had to
beat the elephant; and after that he was too stiff and tired to take his
supper.” My natural inquiry whether the elephant had been able to take
_his_ supper was set aside as frivolous.
Knowing something of the profound piety of the keepers at the (London)
“Zoo” in relation to snake-feeding, I was pained to learn from this good
woman that her husband, who, unfortunately, was not employed in a
reptile-department, had “lost his faith,” and for a reason which I think
has not before been recorded among the many modern causes of unbelief.
“You see, sir, Johnny can never again hold with the Church, after the
way he’s seen clergymen going on with girls in the elephant house.”
When speaking of cruel pastimes, I referred to the value of the term
“blood-sports” in the many controversies which we waged. Just as the
fortunes of a book may be affected by its title, so in ethical and
political discussions there is often what may be called a winning word;
and where none such is found ready to hand, it is advisable to invent
one. Thus the League made good play with “flagellomania,” as used by Mr.
Bernard Shaw in one of his lectures; and “brutalitarian” (an invention
of our own, I think) did us yeoman service, as will be seen in a later
chapter. “Murderous Millinery,” another term which has gained a wide
circulation, was first used as a chapter-heading in my _Animals’
Rights_; and though it rather shocked some zoophilists of the older
school, who presumably thought that only a human being can be
“murdered,” it served a useful purpose, perhaps, in drawing attention
to the revolting cruelty that underlies the plumage trade. In its
condemnation of these barbarities, as in other matters, the Humanitarian
League was a pioneer; its pamphlet on “The Extermination of Birds,”
written by Miss Edith Carrington, and published nearly thirty years ago,
played a marked part in the creation of a better public opinion; and a
Bill drafted by the League in 1901, to prohibit the use of the plumage
of certain rare and beautiful birds, attracted very wide public
attention, and was the basis of subsequent attempts at legislation. But
here it must be added that the man who has done more than all the
Societies together to insure the passage of a Plumage Bill is Mr. James
Buckland. Nothing in the humanitarian movement has been finer than the
way in which Mr. Buckland forced this question to the front and made it
peculiarly his own.
Every whit as savage as the feather-trade is the fur-trade, responsible
as it is for some most horrible methods of torture--the steel-trap,
which inflicts shocking injuries on its victim; the spring-pole, which
jerks both trap and captive high in air, there to hang till the trapper
next comes on his rounds; the terrible “dead-fall” used for bears and
other large animals; the poisoning of wolves with strychnine; and the
abominations in the butchery of seals. Even the fashionable people who
wear furs (in a climate where there is not the least need of such
clothing) would hardly be able to continue the habit if they knew how
their “comforts” were provided; as it is, the Feather-Headed Woman is
not a commoner sight in our streets than the Ass in the skin of the
(Sea) Lion. It would seem that fur-wearers are almost unconscious that
their sables and sealskins are the relicts of previous possessors, and,
like the heroines of modern drama, have very decidedly had “a past”; or,
if they do not wholly forget this fact, they think it quite natural that
_they_ should now have their turn with the skin, as the animal had
before. Thus Pope, in a well-known couplet:
Know, Nature’s children all divide her care;
The fur that warms a monarch warmed a bear.
One would have thought that the bear who grew the skin had somewhat more
right to it than the monarch! Politicians may talk of “one man, one
vote”; but really, if there is ever to be a civilized state, a programme
of “one man, one skin” seems fairer and more democratic.
XII
A FADDIST’S DIVERSIONS
No greyhound loves to cote a hare, as I to turn and course a
fool.--SCOTT’S _Kenilworth_.
I wonder how many times, during the past thirty years, we humanitarians
were told that we were “faddists,” or “cranks,” or “sentimentalists,”
that our hearts were “better than our heads,” and that we were totally
lacking in a sense of humour. I feel sure that if I had kept all the
letters and press-cuttings in which we found ourselves thus described,
they would amount not to hundreds but to thousands; for it seemed to be
a common belief among the genial folk whose unpleasant practices were
arraigned by us that the Committee of the Humanitarian League must be a
set of sour Puritans, sitting in joyless conclave, and making solemn
lamentation over the wickedness of the world. Our opponents little knew
how much we were indebted to them for providing a light and comic side
in a controversy which might otherwise have been just a trifle dull.
It was said by Gibbon, that it was the privilege of the medieval church
“to defend nonsense by cruelties.” Nowadays we see the patrons of sport,
vivisection, butchery, and other time-honoured institutions, adopting
the contrary process, and defending cruelties by nonsense. And by _what_
nonsense! I do not know where else one can find such grotesque
absurdities, such utter topsy-turvydom of argument, as in the quibbling
modern brutality which gives sophisticated reasons for perpetuating
savage customs.
Of some of the fallacies of the cannibalistic conscience I have already
spoken: a volume could easily be filled with not less diverting
utterances culled from kindred fields of thought. The apologists of the
Royal Buckhounds, for instance, were comedians of the first rank, a
troupe of entertainers who long ago anticipated “The Follies.” Did they
not themselves assure us that, in hunting the carted stag, they “rode to
save the deer for another day”? Such devotion needed another Lovelace:
Did’st wonder, since my love was such,
I hunted thee so sore?
I could not love thee, Deer, so much,
Loved I not Hunting more.
The stag, so a noble lord pointed out at a meeting of the Sporting
League, was “a most pampered animal.” “When he was going to be hunted,
he was carried to the meet in a comfortable cart. When set down, the
first thing he did was to crop the grass. When the hounds got too near,
they were stopped. By and by he lay down, and was wheeled back to his
comfortable home. It was a life many would like to live.” Thus it was
shown to be a deprivation, to humans and non-humans alike, not to be
hunted by a pack of staghounds over a country of barbed wire and broken
bottles. Life seemed poor and mean without it.
Fox-hunting, too, has always been refreshingly rich in sophistries. The
farmer is adjured to be grateful to the Hunt, because the fox is killed,
and the fox because his species (not himself) is “preserved”$1 thus the
sportsman takes credit either way--on the one hand, for the destruction
of a pest; on the other, for saving similar pests from extermination. It
is a scene for a Gilbertian opera or a “Bab Ballad”; it makes one feel
that this British blood-sport must be deleterious not only to the
victims of the chase, but to the mental capacity of the gentlemen who
indulge in it.
The climax of absurdity was reached, perhaps, in the dedication by the
Archbishop of York (Dr. Cosmo Lang) of a stained window--a _very_
stained window, as was remarked at the time--in the church of Moor
Monkton, to the memory of the Rev. Charles Slingsby, an aged
blood-sportsman who broke his neck in the hunting-field. That a minister
should have been “launched into eternity,” as the phrase is, while
chasing a fox, might have been expected to cause a sense of deep pain,
if not shame, to his co-religionists: what happened was that an
Archbishop was found willing to eulogize, in a consecrated place of
worship, not only the old gentleman whose life was thus thrown away, but
the sport of fox-hunting itself: Dr. Lang pronounced, in fact, what may
be called the Foxology. Of the stained window, with its representation,
on one part, of St. Hubert and the stag, and on the other of St.
Francis--yes, St. Francis--giving his blessing to the birds, one can
only think with a smile. A few months later, an Izaak Walton memorial
window was placed in Winchester Cathedral in honour of “the quaint old
cruel coxcomb” whom Byron satirized. Whether, in this work of religious
art, the pious angler is portrayed in the act of impaling the live frog
on the hook “as if he loved him,” the newspapers did not state.
Many instances might be quoted of the deep godliness, at times even
religious rapture, felt by the votaries of blood-sports; perhaps one
from the German Crown Prince’s _Leaves from my Hunting Diary_ is most
impressive: “To speak of religious feelings is a difficult matter. I
only know one thing--I have never felt so near my God as when I, with my
rifle on my knee, sat in the golden loneliness of high mountains, or in
the moving silence of the evening forest.” This sort of sentiment is by
no means exclusively of German make. Listen to the piety of a big
game-hunter, Mr. H. W. Seton-Karr: “Why did Almighty God create lions to
prey on harmless animals? And should we not, even at the expense of a
donkey as bait, be justified in reducing their number?” Here, again, is
what the Rev. Walter Crick had to say in defence of the fur-trade: “If
it is wrong to carry a sealskin muff, the camel’s-hair raiment of St.
John Baptist, to say nothing of the garments worn by our first parents
in the Garden of Eden, stands equally condemned.”
Strictly ecclesiastical was the tone of a pamphlet which hailed from New
York State, entitled “The Dog Question, discussed in the Interest of
Humanity,” and concluded in these terms: “Now, my boy or girl, whichever
you are, drop this nonsense about dogs. They are demanding valuable time
that should be employed in teaching such as you. A dog cannot love you.
You cannot love a dog. Naught beside a divine soul can love or be loved.
Chloroform your dog, and take to reading your Testament.”
I once overheard a clergyman, who had taken his seat at a tea-table in a
Surrey garden, sharply call to order some boys of his party who were
striking wildly at wasps and mashing them with any instrument that was
handy. I listened, thinking that at last I was going to hear some wise
words on that silly and disgusting practice in which many excitable
persons indulge; but it turned out that the cause of the reverend
gentleman’s displeasure was merely that he had not yet “said grace”:
that done, the wasp-mashing was resumed without interruption.
Space would fail me, were I to attempt to cite one-hundredth part of the
amazing Book of Fallacies written in defence of Brutality. “Methinks,”
said Sir Herbert Maxwell, “were it possible to apply the referendum to
our flocks and herds, the reply would come in a fashion on which
vegetarians scarcely calculate.” There would be a universal roar of
remonstrance, it seems, from oxen, sheep, and swine, at the proposal to
sever their grateful association with the drover and the slaughterman.
Even more delightful was Mr. W. T. Stead, when he received from the
spirit world a message to the effect that vegetarianism was good for
some persons but not good for _him_. That message, I think, smacked less
of the starry spheres than of the _Review of Reviews_ office: if it was
not pure spirit, it was pure Stead.
The “mystics” were often a great joy to us; for example, Mr. J. W.
Lloyd, author of an occult work called _Dawn-Thought_, expressed himself
as follows: “When I go afield with my gun, and kill my little brother,
the Rabbit, I do not therefore cease to love him, or deny my
relationship, or do him any real wrong. I simply set him free to come
one step nearer to me.” Here was Brer Fox again, only funnier. We
suggested to Mr. Lloyd that “Brawn-Thought” might be a more appropriate
title for his book.
Thus, like pedagogues, we faddists, too, had our diversions; cheered as
we were in the weary work of propaganda by such mental harlequinades as
those of which I have quoted a few specimens almost at random.
Perhaps the most laughable thing about the poor spavined Fallacies was
the entire confidence with which they were trotted out. They were very
old and very silly; they had again and again been refuted; yet they were
always advanced in a manner which seemed to say: “Surely _this_ is an
argument you have never heard before? Surely you will give up your
humanitarian sentiment _now_?” As the frequent oral exposure of such
inveterate sophisms was a tedious task, we found it convenient to print
them, tabulated and numbered, each with its proper refutation, under
some such title as “Familiar Fallacies,” or, borrowing from Sydney
Smith, “The Noodle’s Oration”; and then, when some opponent came along
exultingly with one or other of them, all we had to do was to send him
the list, with a mark against his own delusion. Trust one who has tried
the plan: it is more effective than any amount of personal talk. The man
who will bore you to death with his pertinacious twaddle, in the belief
that he is saying something new, will soon tire of it when he finds the
whole story already in print, with a “See number--” written large in
blue pencil against his most original argument.
But the League did not stop at that point: we felt ourselves competent,
after years of experience, to carry the war into the enemies’ camp--to
hoist them with their own petard by means of the _reductio ad absurdum_,
a pretended defence of the very practices which we were attacking. The
publication of the first and only number of _The Brutalitarian, a
Journal for the Sane and Strong_, went far towards achieving our aims.
The printers were inundated with requests for copies, and the editor (as
I happen to know) received many letters of warm congratulation on his
efforts “to combat the sickly sentiments of modern times.” The press, as
a whole, regarded the new paper with amusement tempered with caution:
some suspecting in it the hand of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, some of Mr.
Bernard Shaw, while one venturesome editor hinted that the humanitarians
themselves might have been concerned in it, but prudently added that
“perhaps that would be attributing too much cleverness to the
Humanitarian League.” So the authorship of the _Brutalitarian_, like
that of the letters of Junius, remained a secret; but the laughter
caused by its preposterous eulogies of Flogging put a stop for the time
to the cry that had been raised in _Blackwood_ by Mr. G. W. Steevens and
others, that “we have let Brutality die out too much.” They did not
relish their own panacea, when it was served to them in an undiluted
form, and with imbecility no less than brutality as its principal
ingredient.
The Eton Beagles, of course, offered a tempting mark for satire, as it
was easy to hit upon a strain of balderdash, in mock defence of
hare-hunting, the absurdity of which would be apparent to the ordinary
reader, yet would escape the limited intelligence of schoolboys and
sporting papers. Accordingly, there appeared in 1907, two numbers of
_The Beagler Boy_, conducted by two Old Etonians with the professed
purpose of “saving a gallant school sport from extinction,” and with the
ulterior design of showing that there is nothing too fatuous to be
seriously accepted as argument by the upholders of blood-sports.
The success of the _Beagler Boy_ in this adventure was not for a moment
in doubt. The Etonians were enthusiastic over it. The _Sportsman_ found
it “a publication after our own heart,” and “far more interesting and
invigorating than anything we are capable of”; and the hoax was welcomed
in like manner by _Sporting Life_, _Horse and Hound_, and the
_Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News_, a periodical described (by
itself) as “bright, entertaining, and original.” One of the most
solemnly comic notices was that in _Countryside_, Mr. E. Kay Robinson’s
paper, which found the _Beagler Boy_ “clever and strenuous, but of
course _ex parte_”; but the gem of the collection was a long and serious
dissertation on “Boys and Beagles” in the _British Medical Journal_,
which thought that its readers would be glad to have their attention
directed to the new sporting organ. There was a _sauve qui peut_ among
these worthy people when, from the general laughter in the press, they
learnt that they had been imposed upon; but the shock was borne most
good-humouredly. “Even the beagler boys,” as was remarked by the
_Evening Standard_, “those of them, at least, who know how rare and
precious an instrument satire is, may forgive, after they have read:
perhaps some will even be converted.” Their disillusionment must
certainly have been rather keenly felt at the time; like that of the
lion who, as related in _The Man-Eaters of Tsavo_, had carried off what
he thought was a coolie from the tent, only to find, when he had gone
some distance, that it was a sack of sawdust.
The _Beagler Boy_ was added, by request, to Lord Harcourt’s collection
of books, pamphlets, and other matter relating to Eton, which at a later
date he presented to the School. It must, I feel sure, be gratifying to
Sir George Greenwood, and to the other Old Etonian who collaborated with
him in the editorship, to know that the fruits of their toil are thus
enshrined in the archives of Eton College.
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?”