George Thorndike Angell was born at Southbridge, Massachusetts, June
5, 1823. He was educated in the public schools and graduated from
Dartmouth College in 1846. After study at the Harvard law school he was
admitted to the bar in 1851. For thirty-four years he has headed the
work for the humane treatment of animals and helpless human beings.
In 1868, when a young man of twenty-two, he founded the Massachusetts
society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. He has served as
its president since its inception, no one being better fitted to fill
the position. He has propagated his ideas on humanity to animals by
many organizations, and forty-four thousand “bands of mercy” speak for
his efficient and zealous management. As an editor and publisher, his
activity has been enormous, for in one year his societies sent out
117,000,000 pages of literature. His work for dumb brutes is so well
known that it has overshadowed those other forms of philanthropy with
which he has to do, and which in the case of an ordinary man would have
made him a reputation. The work of the Social Science Association, of
which Mr. Angell is a director, is of a varied nature, and ranges from
the prevention of crime to the detection of food adulteration, or from
the betterment of tenement houses to obtaining a higher standard of
citizenship.