was another of our American comrades. He arrived one afternoon
unexpectedly at the League’s office, with a letter of introduction from
Crosby. It is often difficult to know what to do with such letters in
the presence of their bearer--whether to keep him waiting till the
message has been deciphered, or to greet him without knowing fully who
he is--but on this occasion a glance at Crosby’s first three words was
enough, for I saw: “This is Darrow,” and I knew that Darrow was the
author of “Crime and Criminals,” an entirely delightful lecture,
brimming over with humour and humanity, which had been delivered to the
prisoners of the Chicago County Gaol; and I had heard of him from Crosby
as a brilliant and successful advocate, who had devoted his genius not
to the quest of riches or fame, but to the cause of the poor and the
accused. It _was_ Darrow; and as I looked into a face in which strength
and tenderness were wonderfully mingled, the formalities of first
acquaintance seemed to be mercifully dispensed with, and I felt as if I
had known him for years. Since that time Darrow has become widely known
in America by his pleadings in the Haywood and other Labour trials, and
more recently through the McNamara case. He is the author of several
very remarkable works. His _Farmington_ is a fascinating book of
reminiscences, and _An Eye for an Eye_ the most impressive story ever
written on the subject of the death-penalty.
Let me now pass to a very different champion of our cause. In connection
with the _Humanitarian_, the _Humane Review_, and the League’s
publications in general, I received a number of letters from “Ouida,”
written mostly on that colossal notepaper which her handwriting
required, some of them so big that the easiest way to read them was to
pin them on the wall and then stand back as from a picture. Her large
vehement nature showed itself not only in the passionate wording of
these protests against cruelties of various kinds, but in her queer
errors in detail, and in the splendid carelessness with which the
envelopes were often addressed. One much-travelled wrapper, directed
wrongly, and criss-crossed with postmarks and annotations, I preserved
as a specimen of the tremendous tests to which the acumen of the Post
Office was subjected by her.
Ouida was often described as “fanatical;” but though her views were
certainly announced in rather unmeasured terms, I found her reasonable
when any error or exaggeration was pointed out. Her sincerity was beyond
question; again and again she lent us the aid of her pen, and as the
press was eager to accept her letters, she was a valuable ally, though
through all that she wrote there ran that pessimistic tone which marked
her whole attitude to modern life. Whatever her place in literature, she
was a friend of the oppressed and a hater of oppression, and her name
deserves to be gratefully remembered for the burning words which she
spoke on behalf of those who could not speak for themselves.
It was always a cause of pride to the Humanitarian League that its
principles were broad enough to win the support of thoughtful and
feeling men, without regard to differences of character or of opinion
upon other subjects. A striking instance of this catholicity was seen on
an occasion when the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes was lecturing before the
League on the attitude of Nonconformists towards Humanitarianism, and
Mr. G. W. Foote, editor of the _Freethinker_, and President of the
National Secular Society, was present in the audience; for Mr. Price
Hughes and Mr. Foote had been engaged in a very bitter personal
controversy concerning the alleged conversion of a certain “atheist
shoemaker.” When Mr. Foote rose to take part in the discussion, I
noticed a sudden look of concern on the face of the lecturer, as he
whispered to me: “Is that Mr. Foote?” expecting doubtless a
recrudescence of hostilities; but on the neutral, or rather the
universal ground of humanitarianism, hostilities could not be; and
questions bearing on the subject of the lecture were courteously asked
and answered by antagonists who, however sharply at variance on other
questions, were in their humanity at one.
Looking back over a large period of the League’s work, I can think of no
one who gave us more constant proofs of friendship than Mr. Foote; and
his testimony was the more welcome because of the very high and rare
intellectual powers which he wielded. Few men of his time combined in
equal degree such gifts of brain and heart. I have heard no public
speaker who had the faculty of going so straight to the core of a
subject--of recapturing and restoring, as it were, to the attention of
an audience that jewel called “the point,” on which all are supposed to
be intent, but which seems so fatally liable to be mislaid. It was
always an intellectual treat to hear him speak; and though, owing to
religious prejudices, his public reputation as thinker and writer was
absurdly below his deserts he had the regard of George Meredith and
others who were qualified to judge, and the enthusiastic support of his
followers. All social reformers, whether they acknowledge it or not, owe
a debt of gratitude to iconoclasts like Bradlaugh and Foote, who made
free speech possible where it was hardly possible before.
Mr. Passmore Edwards, renowned as a philanthropist, was another of our
supporters; indeed, he once proposed indirectly, through a friend, that
he should be elected President of the League; but this suggestion we did
not entertain, because, though we valued his appreciation, we were
anxious to keep clear of all ceremonious titles and “figure-heads” that
might possibly compromise our freedom of action. Perhaps, too, we were a
little piqued by an artless remark which Mr. Edwards had made to the
Rev. J. Stratton, who was personally intimate with him: “It is for the
League to do the small things, Mr. Stratton. Leave the great things to
me.” None the less, Mr. Edwards remained on most friendly terms with the
League; and when the Warden of the Passmore Edwards Settlement curtly
requested us not to send him any more of our “circulars,” Mr. Edwards
expressed his surprise and regret, and added these words: “If the
Passmore Edwards Settlement does as much good [as the Humanitarian
League] in proportion to the means at its disposal, I shall be
abundantly satisfied.”
Two other friends I must not leave unmentioned. Mr. W. J. Stillman’s
delightful story of his pet squirrels, _Billy and Hans_, was the most
notable of the many charming things written by him in praise of that
humaneness which, to him, was identical with religion. A copy of the
book which he gave me, and which I count among my treasures, bears marks
of having been nibbled on the cover. “The signature of my Squirrels,”
Mr. Stillman had written there. I value no autograph more than that of
Billy or Hans.
Mr. R. W. Trine used often to visit the League when he was in London.
He had an extraordinary aptitude for re-stating unpopular truths in a
form palatable to the public; and his _Every Living Creature_, which was
practically a Humanitarian League treatise in a new garb, has had a wide
circulation. Mr. Trine, many years ago, asked me to recommend him to a
London publisher with a view to an English edition of his _In Tune with
the Infinite_; and I have it as a joke against my friend Mr. Ernest Bell
that when I mentioned the proposal to him he at first looked grave and
doubtful. Eventually he arranged matters with Mr. Trine, and I do not
think his firm has had reason to regret it, for the book has sold by
hundreds of thousands.
Enough has been said to show that the humanitarian movement was not in
want of able counsellors and allies; and there were not a few others of
whom further mention would have to be made if this book were a history
of the League. The support of such friends as Mr. Edward Carpenter, Mr.
Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Besant, Mr. W. H. Hudson, and Mr. Herbert Burrows,
was taken for granted. Sir Sydney Olivier, distinguished alike as
thinker and administrator, was at one time a member of the Committee; a
similar position was held for many years by Captain Alfred Carpenter,
R.N. Even Old Etonians were not unknown in our ranks. Mr. Goldwin Smith
paid tribute to the justice of our protests against both vivisection and
the Eton hare-hunt, as may be seen in two letters which he wrote to me,
now included in his published Correspondence. In Sir George Greenwood
our Committee had for years a champion both in Parliament and in the
press, whose wide scholarship, armed with a keen and rapier-like humour,
made many a dogmatical opponent regret his entry into the fray. Readers
of that subtly reasoned book, _The Faith of an Agnostic_, will not need
to be told that its author’s philosophy is no mere negative creed, but
one that on the ethical side finds expression in very real humanitarian
feeling.
Belonging to the younger generation, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Deuchar were
among the most valuable of the League’s “discoveries”: rarely, I
suppose, has a reform society had the aid of a more talented pair of
writers. Mr. Deuchar has a genuine gift of verse which, if cultivated,
should win him a high place among present-day poets: if anything finer
and more discriminating has been written about Shelley than his sonnet,
first printed in the _Humane Review_, I do not know it; and in his small
volume of poems, _The Fool Next Door_, published under a disguised name,
there are other things not less good. Mrs. Deuchar, as Miss M. Little,
earned distinction as a novelist of great power and insight: she, too,
was a frequent contributor to the _Humane Review_ and the
_Humanitarian_.
The _Humane Review_, which has been mentioned more than once in the
foregoing pages, was a quarterly magazine, published by Mr. Ernest Bell,
and edited by myself, during the first decade of the century. It was
independent of the Humanitarian League, but was very useful as an organ
in which the various subjects with which the League dealt could be
discussed more fully than was possible in the brief space of its
journal. The list of contributors to the _Review_ included the names of
many well-known writers; and if humanitarians had cared sufficiently for
their literature, it would have had a longer life: that it survived for
ten years was due to the fact that it was very generously supported by
two excellent friends of our cause, Mr. and Mrs. Atherton Curtis.
The Humanitarian League itself resembled the _Humane Review_ in this,
that its ordinary income was never sufficient to meet the yearly
expenditure, and had it not been for the special donations of a few of
its members, notably Mr. Ernest Bell, and some welcome bequests, its
career would have closed long before 1919. The League ended, as it
began, in its character of Forlorn Hope. We had the goodwill of the
free-lances, not of the public or of the professions. I have already
mentioned how the artists, with one or two important exceptions, stood
aloof from what they doubtless regarded as a meddlesome agitation;
literary men, even those who agreed with us, were often afraid of
incurring the name “humanitarian”; schoolmasters looked askance at a
society which condemned the cane; and religious folk were troubled
because we did not begin our meetings with prayers (as was the fashion a
quarter-century ago), and because none of the usual pietistic phrases
were read in our journal. From the clergy we got little cheer; though
there were a few of them who did not hesitate to say personally with
Dean Kitchin, that the League “was carrying out the best side of our
Saviour’s life and teaching.” Mr. Price Hughes, in particular, was most
courageous in his endorsement of an ethic which found little favour
among his co-religionists. Archbishop Temple and some leaders of
religious opinion personally signed our memorials against cruel sport;
and the Bishop of Hereford (Dr. Percival) introduced our Spurious Sports
Bill in the House of Lords; yet from Churchmen as a body our cause
received no sympathy, and many of them were ranged against it.
In the many protests against cruelty in its various forms, whether of
judicial torture, or vivisection, or butchery, or blood-sport, the
reproachful cry: “Where are the clergy?” has frequently been raised, but
raised by those who have forgotten, in each case, that there was nothing
new in the failure of organized Religion to aid in the work of
emancipation.
I wish to be just in this matter. I know well from a long experience of
work in an unpopular cause that humaneness is not a perquisite of any
one sect or creed, whether affirmative or negative, religious or
secular; it springs up in the heart of all sorts of persons in all sorts
of places, according to no law of which at present we have cognisance.
In every age there have been men whose religion was identical with
their humanity; men like that true saint, John Woolman, whose gift, as
has been well said, was love. St. Francis is the favourite instance of
this type; but sweet and gracious as he was, with his appeals to
“brother wolf” and “sister swallows,” his example has perhaps suffered
somewhat by too frequent quotation, which raises the suspicion that the
Church makes such constant use of him because its choice is but a
limited one. Less known, and more impressive, is the story, related by
Gibbon, of the Asiatic monk, Telemachus (A.D. 404), who, having dared to
interrupt the gladiatorial shows by stepping into the arena to separate
the combatants, was overwhelmed under a shower of stones. “But the
madness of the people soon subsided; they respected the memory of
Telemachus, who had deserved the honour of martyrdom, and they submitted
without a murmur to laws which abolished for ever the human sacrifices
of the amphitheatre.” Gibbon’s comment is as follows: “Yet no church has
been dedicated, no altar has been erected, to the only monk who died a
martyr in the cause of humanity.”
Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous
doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies
much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep
division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his
immortal soul, and the soulless “beasts,” has been responsible for an
incalculable sum of cruelty.
I knew a Catholic priest, of high repute, who excused the Spanish
bull-fight on the plea that it forms a safety-valve for men’s savage
instincts; their barbarity goes out on the bull, and leaves them gentle
and kindly in their domestic relations. It is, in fact, the story of the
scape-goat repeated; only the victim is not a goat, and he does not
escape. Everywhere among the religious, except in a few individuals, one
meets the persistent disbelief in the kinship of all sentient life: it
is the religious, not the heretics, who are the true infidels and
unbelievers. A few years ago the Bishop of Oxford refused to sanction a
prayer for the animals, because “it has never been the custom of the
Church to pray for any other beings than those we think of as rational.”
I was told by the Rev. G. Ouseley, an old man whose heart and soul were
in the work of alleviating the wrongs of animals, that he once
approached all the ministers of religion in a large town on the south
coast, in the hope of inducing them to discountenance the cruel
treatment of cats. He met with little encouragement; and one of the
parsons on whom he called, the most influential in the place, bluntly
ridiculed the proposal. “One can’t chuck a cat across the room,” he
said, “without some old woman making a fuss about it.” Mr. Ouseley’s
only comment, when he repeated this remark, was: “A Christian
clergyman!”
The following is an extract from a letter written at Jerusalem by my
friend Mr. Philip G. Peabody, who has travelled very widely, and has
been a most careful observer of the treatment accorded to animals,
especially to horses, in the various countries visited by him:
“When I reflect that for centuries, and from all parts of the
world, the most earnest Christians have been coming here, and are
still coming; that often they remain here until they die; that
scores of great churches here are crowded with pious thousands; and
that not one human being of them, so far as I can see or can learn,
has the slightest regard for the cruelties occurring hundreds of
times daily, so atrocious that the most heartless ruffian in Boston
would indignantly protest against them--what am I to think of the
value of Christianity to make men good, tender, and kind?”
This opinion would seem to be corroborated by that of Dean Inge, who has
described Man as “a bloodthirsty savage, not much changed since the
first Stone Age.” Unfortunately, the Gloomy Dean, whose oracular
utterances are so valued by journalists as providing excellent material
for “copy,” does not himself extend any sympathy to those who are
endeavouring to mitigate the savageness which he deplores, and which his
religion has failed to amend.
Perhaps no better test of a people’s civilization could be found than in
the manner of their religious festivals. What of our Christmas--the
season when peace and goodwill take the form of a general massacre
followed by a general gormandizing, with results not much less fatal to
the merry-makers than to their victims? One would think that a decent
cannibal would be sickened by the shows of live cattle, fattened for the
knife, and thousands of ghastly carcases hung in the butchers’ shops;
but, on the contrary, the spectacle is everywhere regarded as a genial
and festive one. The protests which the Humanitarian League used to
make, in letters to ministers of religion and other persons of
influence, met with hardly any response; sometimes a press-writer would
piously vindicate the sacred season, as “Dagonet” once did in the
_Referee_: “We are, of course, from a certain point of view, barbarians
in our butchery of beasts for the banquet. The spectacle of headless
animals hanging on hooks and dripping with blood is not æsthetic. But
Nature is barbarous in her methods, and it is a law of Nature that one
set of live things should live upon another set of live things. To kill
and eat is a natural instinct. To denounce it as inhuman is not only
absurd, but in a sense impious.” Piety and pole-axe, it will be seen, go
together, in the celebration of the Christian Saturnalia.
Christmas comes but once a year:
Let this our anguish soften!
For who could bide that season drear
Of bogus mirth and gory cheer,
If it came more often?
From Religion, then, as such, the League expected nothing and got
nothing; but it must be owned that its failure to obtain any substantial
help from the Labour movement was something of a disappointment; for
though not a few leaders, men such as Keir Hardie, J. R. Clynes, J. R.
Macdonald, Bruce Glasier, and George Lansbury, were good friends to our
cause, the party, as a whole, showed little interest in the reforms
which we advocated, even in matters which specially concerned the
working classes, such as the Vagrancy Act, the Game Laws, and the use of
the cane in Board Schools. As for the non-humans, it is a curious fact
that while the National Secular Society includes among its immediate
practical objects a more humane treatment of animals, and their legal
protection against cruelty, the Labour movement, like the Churches, has
not cared to widen its outlook even to the extent of demanding better
conditions for the more highly organized domestic animals.
I have often thought that Walter Crane’s cartoon, “The Triumph of
Labour,” has a deep esoteric meaning, though perhaps not intended by its
author. Every socialist knows the picture--a May-day procession, in
which a number of working-folk are riding to the festival in a large
wain, with a brave flutter of flags and banners, and supporting above
them, with upturned palms, a ponderous-looking globe on which is
inscribed “The Solidarity of Labour”--the whole party being drawn by two
sturdy Oxen, the true heroes of the scene, who must be wishing the
solidarity of labour were a little less solid, for it would appear that
those heedless merry-makers ought to be prosecuted for overloading their
faithful friends. The Triumph of Labour seems a fit title for the scene,
but in a sense which democrats would do well to lay to heart. Do not
horses and other “beasts of burden” deserve their share of citizenship?
Centuries hence, perhaps, some learned antiquarian will reconstruct,
from such anatomical data as may be procurable, the gaunt, misshapen,
pitiable figure of our now vanishing cab-horse, and a more civilized
posterity will shudder at the sight of what we still regard as a
legitimate agent in locomotion.
Such, then, was the position of our Forlorn Hope in the years that saw
the menace of Armageddon looming larger. Like every one else,
humanitarians underrated the vastness of the catastrophe towards which
the world was drifting; but some at least saw the madness of the
scaremongers who were persistently fostering in their respective nations
the spirit of hatred; and five years before the crash came it was
pointed out in the _Humanitarian_ that a terrible war was, consciously
or unconsciously, the aim and end of the outcry that was being raised
about the wicked designs of Germany, to the concealment of the more
important fact that every nation’s worst enemies are the quarrelsome or
interested persons within its own borders, who would involve two
naturally friendly peoples in a foolish and fratricidal strife.
We knew too well, from the lessons of the Boer War, what sort of folk
some of these were, who, themselves without the least intention of
fighting, had stirred up such warlike passions in the Yellow Press. I
had been acquainted with some of them at that time, and had not
forgotten how, meeting one such firebrand, I noticed with surprise that
he had become facially, as well as journalistically, yellow, his cheeks
having assumed an ochreous hue since I had seen him a day or two before.
He confided his secret to me. He had once enlisted in the army; and
having, as he supposed, been discharged, was now stupefied by receiving
a notice to rejoin his regiment. And there he sat, wondering how he
could meet his country’s call, a yellow journalist indeed: I saw him in
his true colours that day.
But even thus, though we suspected, with a great eruption in prospect,
that to pursue our humanitarian work was but to cultivate the slopes of
a volcano, we did not at all guess the magnitude of the coming disaster.
It might bring a return, we feared, to the ethics of, say, the Middle
Ages; our countrymen’s innate savagery would be rather more openly and
avowedly practised--that would be all. They would be like the troupe of
monkeys who, having been trained to go through their performance with
grave and sedate demeanour, were loosed suddenly, by the flinging of a
handful of nuts, into all their native lawlessness. What we did _not_
anticipate--the very thing that happened--was that the atavism aroused
by such a conflict would bring to light much more aboriginal instincts
than those of a few centuries back; that it was not the medieval man who
was being summoned from the vasty deep, but the prehistoric troglodyte,
or Cave-Man, who, far from having become extinct, as was fondly
supposed, still survived in each and all of us, awaiting his chance of
resurrection.
XV
THE CAVE-MAN RE-EMERGES
I scan him now,
Beastlier than any phantom of his kind
That ever butted his rough brother-brute
For lust or lusty blood or provender.
TENNYSON.