private purposes, might have been a public possession of inestimable
value had it been tended as it deserved; and much yet remains in
Snowdonia that might be saved for the enjoyment and refreshment of
future generations, if the apathy of public feeling, and of the Welsh
people, could be dispelled. But it is useless to look for local
resistance to this vandalism, for one is always met by the assertion,
true but irrelevant, that such enterprises “give work”; which, indeed,
would equally justify the pulling down of Westminster Abbey to “give
work” to the unemployed of London. Nothing but an enlightened public
opinion, unmistakably expressed, can now avert the destruction (for such
it is) of the noblest of Welsh, perhaps of all British mountains.
It is strange that the incongruity--the lack of humour--in these
outrages on the sanctitude of a great mountain does not make itself
felt. What could be more ridiculous, apart from the gross vandalism of
the act, than to put a railway-station on Snowdon? A friend who knows
the Welsh mountains intimately told me that on his first visit to the
peak, after the building of the Summit Hotel, he remarked to a
companion: “We shall be expected to have a green chartreuse after lunch
here.” A waiter, overhearing him, said: “We ain’t got no green
chartreuse, sir; but we have cherry brandy and curaçoa, if you like.”
In a little book entitled _On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills_, published in
1908, I commented strongly on these outrages, and the justice of my
criticisms with regard to the ruin of Welsh mountain scenery was not
seriously disputed in the local press, though one editor did accuse me
of being guilty of “a wicked libel upon the people of Wales,” and
expressed himself as having been caused “real pain” by my remarks. When,
however, I asked him to consider what real pain the disfigurement of
Snowdon had caused to mountain-lovers, and suggested that, instead of
taking me to task, he should try to arouse his readers to put an end to
the vandalism which, for the sake of a temporary profit, is ruining some
of the finest portions of Carnarvonshire, he made a reply which was, in
fact, a most signal corroboration of my complaint; for he stated that I
had evidently “no conception of the difficulties which residents in
North Wales have to encounter when they oppose any commercial
enterprise, backed up by English speculators, which threatens to spoil
our beauty-spots.”[38] There we have the fatal truth in a sentence! What
is spoiling Snowdonia is the commercial cupidity of the Welsh
themselves, utilized by English capitalists. The editor naïvely added
that, were I myself living in North Wales, I should be “more
sympathetic.” More sympathetic, that is, with the Welsh residents, who
know that their country is being spoiled, but dare not say so; less
sympathetic with the mountain-lovers who deplore this crime!
In the excuses put forward for the invasion of the mountains with
funicular railways, motor high-roads, and the like, there is a comic
element which would be vastly entertaining if the very existence of
mountain scenery were not at stake. Thus I have been met with the
argument that a mountain railway, such as that on Snowdon, “takes into a
purer atmosphere and into an ennobling environment those who have no
other way of learning the lesson that grand mountains can teach,” to
wit, “the enfeebled toilers of the towns.” I was reminded, as one
convicted of “a little selfishness,” that “the weak and the feeble have
to be considered, as well as the athletic and the hardy.” But, in the
first place, those who travel by so expensive a route as this mountain
railway are rarely the toilers of the towns, nor, so far as I have
observed them, are they “the weak and the feeble.” They seem to be
mostly able-bodied well-to-do tourists, who are too lazy to use their
legs. I once overheard a passenger in a train, describing a recent Swiss
trip, make the remark: “Oh, no, I didn’t _walk_ a step. Funicular
railways up nearly all the mountains--Pilatus, Rigi, and the rest. I
wouldn’t give a fig to _walk_.”
It is amusing, too, to find “imperial” reasons advanced in defence of
the Snowdon railroad, in what is called the “Official Guide,” a pamphlet
published by the London and North-Western Railway at Llanberis England,
we are proudly told, “does not usually care to be behind other countries
in matters of progress, but, with regard to the application of
mechanical means for reaching the peaks of mountains, until now it has
certainly been so.” The inference is obvious. Patriotic climbers should
ascend Snowdon by train.
Then there is the clever appeal to the sense of peril and romance. We
are informed in the same disinterested treatise that the owner of
Snowdon (yes, reader, Snowdon is _owned_!), “having regard to the
exigencies of the modern tourist, the increasing eagerness of people to
‘do’ Snowdon, and the dangers which beset the ordinary ways available
for that purpose, felt that the solitude and sanctity of Snowdon ought,
to a certain extent, to give way before the progressive advance of the
age.” And again: “Hitherto none but the most daring or the most sanguine
would venture to ascend during a storm.... None the less, however,
Snowdon during a storm presents a scene of impressive grandeur, and the
new railway will make it possible to see it under this aspect without
risk.” Henceforth poets will know how to view the grandeur of the
gathering storm. “I climbed the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn,” sang
Scott. The modern singer will take a ticket on the Snowdon Mountain
Tramroad.
The true objection to mountain railways is not that they bring more
people to the mountain, but that they spoil the very thing that the
people come to see, viz. the mountain itself. The environment, in fact,
is no longer “ennobling” when a mountain-top is vulgarized, as Snowdon
has been, by a railway and hotel; it is then not a mountain scene at
all. There are numberless points of view in North Wales, and in every
highland district, to which the weak and feeble can be easily conveyed,
and from which they can see the mountains at their best; but to
construct a railway to the chief summit is “to kill the goose that laid
the golden eggs,” because, when that is done, there is no mountain (in
the true sense) any longer for the enjoyment of either feeble or strong.
And surely the feeble can seek their enjoyment in fitter ways than in
being hauled up mountains by steam. I have heard of a blind man who
walked, with a friend to guide him, to the top of Goatfell, in the Isle
of Arran, because he wished to feel the mountain air and to hear the
thunder of the sea waves far away below. Was not that better than
spoiling Goatfell with a rail? Not, of course, that such railways are
really made for the benefit of the feeble-bodied; they are built for
commercial purposes, to put money into private pockets at the expense of
scenery which should belong to the community as a whole.
But it is not only the nature-lover and the rock-climber who are
interested in the preservation of mountains; the naturalist also, and
the botanist, are very deeply concerned, for the extermination of the
rarer fauna and flora is practically assured unless the onroad of this
vandalism is checked. The golden eagle, the kite, and the osprey are
gone. Do we desire such birds as the raven, the chough, the buzzard, and
the peregrine falcon to survive in their few remaining strongholds? If
so, we must take measures to stop the depredations not only of the
egg-collecting tourist, but of the death-dealing gamekeeper.
The flight of the buzzard is one of the greatest glories of the hills of
Cumberland and Carnarvonshire, and it is deeply to be regretted that so
beautiful and harmless a bird should be wantonly destroyed. The
worst--or should we say the best?--that can be said of the buzzard is
that in very rare instances he has been known to “stoop” at persons who
approach his eyrie. In a letter which appeared in the _Lakes Chronicle_
some years ago a tourist absurdly complained that he had been attacked
on a mountain near Windermere by a “huge bird “--evidently a
buzzard--and urged that “it would be to the advantage of the public if
some good shot were to free the mountain of this foul-fiend usurper.”
The buzzard defending his nest is a “foul-fiend usurper”! Such is the
amount of sympathy which the average tourist has with the wild mountain
bird! And as for the ornithological knowledge, this may be judged from
the fact that a similar incident on the same mountain was actually
described in the papers under the head, “_Bustard_ attacks a clergyman.”
Of the wild upland flora there is the same tale to tell. The craze for
collecting, and what is worse, uprooting, the rarer Alpine plants has
almost brought about the extinction of several species, such as the
_saxifraga nivalis_, which used to be fairly frequent on Snowdon,
Helvellyn, and other British hills; and this in spite of the many
appeals that have been made to the better feeling of tourists. Public
spirit in these matters seems to be wellnigh dead.
What, then, is being done, in the face of these destructive agencies, to
preserve our wild mountain districts, and the wild life that is native
to them, from the ruin with which they are threatened? As far as I am
aware, apart from occasional protests in newspapers, this only--that
appeals are made to the public from time to time by the National Trust
and kindred societies to save, by private purchase, certain “beauty
spots” from spoliation. These appeals cannot but meet with the entire
approval of nature-lovers, and the rescuing of such estates as Catbells,
Gowbarrow, Grange Fell, and others that might be mentioned, represents a
real measure of success. Still the question has to be faced--what is to
be done in the future if, as is certain to happen, the menace to our
mountains is maintained? It is too much to hope that large sums can
always be raised by private subscription; also, while one favoured place
is being safeguarded, others, less fortunate, are being destroyed. We
cannot save our mountains generally by these piecemeal purchases; for
even if the money were always procurable, the rate of destruction
exceeds that of purchase, and the power of the many syndicates that
would exploit the mountains must necessarily be greater than that of the
few Societies that would preserve them. In a word, private action is
quite inadequate, in the long run, to repel so extensive an attack.
What is needed is public action on a scale commensurate with the evil,
in the direction of the “reservation” of certain districts as
sanctuaries for all wild life. We need, in fact, highland parks, in
which the hills themselves, with the wild animals and plants whose life
is of the hills, shall be preserved in their wildness as the property of
the people; an arrangement which would be equally gratifying to the
nature-lover, the naturalist, and the mountaineer, and of vastly more
“profit” to the nation as a whole than the disfigurement of its
beautiful places.
Without at all suggesting that the National Trust should relax its
efforts for the rescue by purchase of particular tracts, I think that it
would be doing a still greater service if it could see its way to
organizing a movement for pressing on the Government the urgent need of
taking some active steps to counteract the injury which is being done by
commercial interests to the true interests of the people. Otherwise the
result will be that while a few spots are saved, whole districts will be
lost, and eventually all that the nation will possess will be some oases
of beauty in a desert of ugliness.
As I have elsewhere pointed out,[39] there is only one thorough solution
of the problem, and that is, to nationalize such districts as Snowdonia,
Lakeland, the Peak of Derbyshire, and other public holiday-haunts, and
so to preserve them for the use and enjoyment of the people for all
time. “If parks, open spaces, railways, tramways, water, and other
public needs can be nationalized, why not mountains? It is impossible to
over-estimate the value of mountains as a recreation-ground for soul and
body; yet, while we are awaking to the need of maintaining public rights
in other directions, we are allowing our mountains--in North Wales and
elsewhere--to be sacrificed to commercial selfishness. If Snowdon, for
instance, had been purchased by the public twenty years ago, the
investment would have been a great deal more profitable than those in
which we usually engage; but while we are willing to spend vast sums on
grabbing other people’s territory, we have not, of course, a penny to
spare for the preservation of our own.”
XIV
THE FORLORN HOPE
At least we witness of thee, ere we die,
That these things are not otherwise, but thus.
SWINBURNE.
Twenty-four years’ work with the Humanitarian League had left many
problems unsolved, many practical matters undecided; but on one point
some of us were now in no sort of uncertainty--that a race which still
clung tenaciously to the practices at which I have glanced in the
foregoing chapters was essentially barbaric, not in its diet only,
though the butchery of animals for food had first arrested our
attention, but also, and not less glaringly, in its penal system, its
sports, its fashions, and its general way of regarding that great body
of our fellow-beings whom we call “the animals.” It did not need Mr.
Howard Moore’s very suggestive book, _Savage Survivals_,[40] to convince
us of this; but we found in the conclusions reached by him an ample
corroboration of those we had long had in mind, and which alone could
explain the stubborn adherence of educated as well as uneducated classes
to a number of primitive and quite uncivilized habits. “It is not
possible,” he says, “to understand the things higher men do, nor to
account for the things that you find in their natures, unless you
recognize the fact that higher men are merely savages made over and only
partially changed.”
Professor F. W. Newman’s warning, that the time was not ripe for a
Humanitarian League, had to this extent been verified: if we had thought
that we were going to effect any great visible changes, we should have
been justly disappointed. But those who work with no expectation of
seeing results cannot be disappointed; they are beyond the scope of
failure, and may even meet, as we did, with some small and unforeseen
success. The League was thus, in the true sense of the term, a Forlorn
Hope; that is, a troop of venturesome pioneers, who were quite
untrammelled by “prospects,” and whose whim it was to open out a path by
which others might eventually follow.
Perhaps the success of the League lay less in what it did than in what
it _demanded_--less, that is, in the defeat of a flogging Bill, or in
the abolition of a cruel sport, than in the fearless, logical, and
unwavering assertion of a clear principle of humaneness, which applies
to the case of human and non-human alike. After all, it does not so
greatly matter whether this or that particular form of cruelty is
prohibited; what matters is that _all_ forms of cruelty should be shown
to be incompatible with progress. Here, I venture to think, the
intellectual and controversial side of the League’s work was of some
value; for before a new system could be built up, the ground had to be
cleared, and the main obstacle to humanitarianism had long been the very
widespread contempt for what is known as “sentiment,” and the idea that
humanitarians were a poor weakly folk who might be ridiculed with
impunity. The Humanitarian League changed all that; and a good many
pompous persons, who had come into collision with its principles,
emerged with modified views and a considerably enlarged experience.
I have already spoken of some of the protagonists of the League: at this
point it may be fitting to recount, in epic fashion, the names and
services of a few of the influential allies who from time to time lent
us their aid.
Mr. Herbert Spencer’s philosophical writings were fully imbued with the
humane spirit. An opponent of militarism, of vindictive penal laws, of
corporal punishment for the young, of cruel sports, and indeed of every
form of brutality, he had done as much as any man of his generation to
humanize public opinion. He willingly signed the Humanitarian League’s
memorials against the Royal Buckhounds and the Eton Beagles.
Dr. Alfred R. Wallace was also in full accord with us, and he was
especially interested in our protest against the Game Laws, “those
abominable engines of oppression and selfishness,” as he described them
in one of several letters which I received from him. He was anxious that
some Member of Parliament should be found who would move an annual
resolution for the abolition of these laws, and he considered that such
a motion “would serve as a very good test of Liberalism and Radicalism.”
In reference to flogging under the old Vagrancy Act, he wrote: “There
are scores or hundreds of these old laws which are a disgrace to
civilization. Many years ago I advocated enacting a law for the
automatic termination of _all_ laws after, say, fifty years, on the
ground that one generation cannot properly legislate for a later one
under totally different conditions.”
“The Truth about the Game Laws,” a pamphlet of which Dr. Wallace
expressed much approval, was written by Mr. J. Connell, author of “The
Red Flag,” whose democratic instincts had led him to acquire first-hand
knowledge of the nocturnal habits of game-keepers, and was prefaced with
some spirited remarks by Mr. Robert Buchanan, who, as having been for
many years a devotee of sport, here occupied, as he himself expressed
it, “the position of the converted clown who denounces topsy-turvydom.”
Buchanan’s humane sympathies were shown in many of his poems, as in his
“Song of the Fur Seal,” inspired by one of the League’s pamphlets; he
wrote also a powerful article on “The Law of Infanticide,” in reference
to one of those cruel cases in which the death-sentence is passed on
some poor distracted girl, and which clearly demonstrate, as Buchanan
pointed out, that “we are still a savage and uncivilized people, able
and willing to mow down with artillery such subject races as are not of
our way of thinking, but utterly blind and indifferent to the sorrows of
the weak and the sufferings of the martyred poor.”
George Meredith, for the last ten or twelve years of his life, was a
friend and supporter of the League. “On a point or two of your
advocacy,” he wrote to me, “I am not in accord with you, but fully upon
most.” He declared the steel trap to be “among the most villainous
offences against humanity”; and he more than once signed the League’s
memorials against such spurious sports as rabbit-coursing and
stag-hunting. When the Royal Buckhounds were abolished in 1891, he wrote
to us: “Your efforts have gained their reward, and it will encourage you
to pursue them in all fields where the good cause of sport, or any good
cause, has to be cleansed of blood and cruelty. So you make steps in our
civilization.”
Mr. Thomas Hardy more than once lent his name to the League’s petitions,
and recognized that in its handling of the problem of animals’ rights it
was grappling with the question “of equal justice all round.” In an
extremely interesting letter, read at the annual meeting in 1910, he
expressed his opinion that “few people seem to perceive fully, as yet,
that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the
common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a
readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of
rightness, the application of what has been called the Golden Rule from
the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom.” This
was, of course, the main contention of the Humanitarian League.
In 1896 the League addressed an appeal to a number of leading artists,
asking them to make it plain that their sympathies were on the
humanitarian side, and that they would at least not be abettors of that
spirit of cruelty which is the ally and companion of ugliness. Very few
replies were received, but among them was one from Mr. G. F. Watts, who,
in becoming a member, wrote us a letter on the cruelty of docking
horses’ tails (“barbarous in those who practise it, infinitely degrading
in those who encourage it from so mean a motive as fashion--only not
contemptible because so much worse”), which was very widely published in
the press, and did great service in bringing an odious fashion into
disrepute. Mr. Walter Crane was another artist who gave support on many
occasions to humanitarian principles; so, too, was Mr. Martin Anderson
(“Cynicus”), who employed on the League’s behalf his great powers as a
satirist in a cartoon which castigated the tame deer hunt.
Count Tolstoy, it goes without saying, was in full sympathy with us; and
so was that many-sided man of genius, M. Elisée Reclus. Famed as
geographer, philosopher, and revolutionist, one is tempted to sum him up
in the word “poet”; for though he did not write in verse, he was a great
master of language, unsurpassed in lucidity of thought and serene beauty
of style. He was a vegetarian, and the grounds of his faith are set
forth in a luminous essay on that subject which he wrote for the
Humanitarian League. Very beautiful, too, is his article on “The Great
Kinship,” worthily translated by Edward Carpenter, in which he portrayed
the primeval friendly relations of mankind with the lower races, and
glanced at the still more wonderful possibilities of the future. His
anarchist views prevented him from formally joining an association
which aimed at legislative action; but his help was always freely given.
“I send you my small subscription,” he wrote, “without any engagement
for the future, not knowing beforehand if next year I will be penniless
or not.” I only once saw Elisée Reclus; it was on the occasion of an
anarchist meeting in which he took part, and he then impressed me as
being the Grand Old Man without rival or peer; never elsewhere have I
seen such magnificent energy and enthusiasm combined with such lofty
intellectual gifts.
Ernest Crosby, another philosophic anarchist, was perhaps as little
known, in proportion to his great merits, as any writer of our time.
Elected as a Republican to the Assembly of New York State, he had been
appointed in 1889 to be a Judge of the International Court in Egypt; but
after serving there five years, his whole life was suddenly changed,
owing largely to a book of Tolstoy’s which fell into his hands: he
resigned his post, and thenceforward passed judgment on no man but
himself. A poet and thinker of high order, he stood up with unfailing
courage against the brute force of “imperialism” in its every form--the
exploitation of one race by another race, of one class by another class,
of the lower animals by mankind. It is strange that his writings,
especially the volume entitled _Swords and Plowshares_, should be almost
unknown to English democrats, for they include many poems which touch a
very high standard of artistic excellence, and a few that are gems of
verse. “The Tyrant’s Song,” for instance, expresses in a few lines the
strength of the Non-Resistant, and of the conscientious objector to
military service (“the man with folded arms”); yet during all the long
controversy on that subject I never once saw it quoted or mentioned. A
superficial likeness between Crosby’s unrhymed poetry and that of Edward
Carpenter led in one case to an odd error on the part of an American
friend to whom I had vainly commended Carpenter’s writings; for in his
joy over _Swords and Plowshares_ he rashly jumped to the conclusion that
“Ernest Crosby” was a _nom de plume_ for the other E.C. “I owe you a
confession,” he wrote. “Hitherto I have not been able to find in
Carpenter anything that substantiated your admiration for him; but _now_
a flood of light is illuminating his _Towards Democracy_.” I
communicated this discovery to the poets concerned, and they were both
charmed by it.
Crosby was a tall handsome man, of almost military appearance, and this,
too, was a cause of misapprehension; for an English friend whom he
visited, and who knew him only through his writings, spent a long
afternoon with him without even discovering that he was the Crosby whose
poems he admired.