A Sheaf

This volume is but a garnering of non-creative writings; mostly pleas of some sort or other—wild oats of a novelist, which he has been asked to bind up. He cannot say that he ha...

“Personally,” he answered, “I don’t think it is going too far. It’s painful in itself, and Heaven alone knows what irritation horses have to suffer from flies through being tail...

The corroboree about me which they were obviously holding became, as I grew used to their manner of talking, increasingly audible. But it was the quail’s words that I first dist...

“First the animals are hung up alive head downwards by a chain fastened to a hind foot, and then they are stuck and bleed to death. The work is done quickly in a collective sens...

Let me draw your attention to an anomaly, which accounts for most of our callousness towards the sufferings of animals. Nearly every one who witnesses with his own eyes the infl...

(5) Consignment of paupers (that is, those without money or friends) to lunatic asylums on the certificate of one doctor—the certificate of two doctors being essential in the ca...

“You recommend that we should be familiarized with the sight of blood? Might I suggest that no blood could be so educative as that of one who propounds the doctrine: Suffering i...

I do not base the appeal of this letter so much on humanity as on common sense. Why, when we are faced with appalling statistics of criminality, with appalling difficulties in d...

Reformation does not come from beating on the prisoner’s fibre with the dull mallet of suffering. To reform one must inspire. There is a spark of good in every man’s breast; the...

If, then, women’s position is inferior to men’s, if the essential reason of this inferiority is her weakness, or, in other words, the still unchecked dominance of force, to what...

For all my love of my old school, for all my realization of the fact that her training equips her children with certain qualities invaluable to public life and public service, I...

I believe that this democratic principle, however imperfectly developed, has so worked in France, in Britain, in the United States, that these countries are already nearly safe...

When I read in the paper of some glorious charge and the great slaughter of the enemy, I feel a thrill through every fibre. It is grand, it is splendid! I take a deep breath of...

The Englishman must have a thing brought under his nose before he will act; bring it there and he will go on acting after everybody else has stopped. He lives very much in the m...

Who knows whether, even in the full whirlwind of this most gigantic struggle, art work may not be produced which, in sum of its ultimate effect on mankind, will outlive and outw...

The first thing he does when he comes down each morning is to read his paper, and the moment he has finished breakfast he sticks the necessary flags into his big map. He began t...

If one dwells too much on the miseries this world contains, there must come a moment when one will say: “Life’s not worth living; I will end it!” But by some dispensation few of...

When the war began we were in what is commonly called “a tidy mess.” If we really want to extract from the furnace of this fearful conflagration some gold of comfort, we shall s...

The war has focussed attention on the need for arresting infant mortality. Good! But there is little use in saving babies if you are not going to feed them decently when they ar...

I cannot explain exactly what I mean by town blight. It is not mere pallor or weakliness, but rather a loss of balance—a tendency to jut here and be squashed in there; an over-n...