Part 13
Another unfailing friend of the League’s Sports Committee was the Hon. FitzRoy Stewart. When I first knew him he was Secretary of the Central Conservative Office, and we were rather surprised at finding an ally in that direction; in fact, we had some suspicions, entirely unjust, as the result proved, that Mr. Stewart might be desirous of learning our plan of campaign against the Royal Buckhounds in the interest of his sporting friends. The first time I visited him at the Conservative headquarters I was introduced to Sir Howard Vincent, M.P., who, though a patron of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had not scrupled to throw in his lot with those who were fighting for the continuance of rabbit-coursing, pigeon-shooting and stag-hunting. He seemed to be a good-natured, vacuous-minded person, and one of his remarks, I remember, was that England is “a paradise for animals.” This was hardly the opinion of FitzRoy Stewart, who was indefatigable with his schemes for the prohibition of the more cruel forms of sport. He had great hopes of young Mr. Winston Churchill, then beginning to be known as a rising star of the Tory party, and at his earnest request a letter was sent to Mr. Churchill from the office of the League, reminding him of Lord Randolph Churchill’s strong denunciation of stag-hunting, and asking his aid against the Buckhounds. Mr. Churchill, however, unmoved by this appeal to his filial piety, sagely opined that the crusade against the Royal Hunt was too democratic.
Mr. FitzRoy Stewart worked closely with the Humanitarian League till his death in 1914; and many were his press letters which he and I jointly composed at the office in Chancery Lane. He liked to come there armed with some sheets of his Carlton Club notepaper, on which the letters, when worded to his satisfaction, were duly copied and signed--“Old Harrovian,” or “A Member of the Carlton Club,” was his favourite signature--and then he sent them off to some influential editors of his acquaintance, whose disgust would have been unmeasured had they known what company their esteemed contributor had been keeping. Mr. Stewart, I must in fairness add, though a strong opponent of blood-sport, was a firm believer in the beneficence of flogging; but he was willing to sink this one point of difference in his general approval of the League’s work. So good-natured was he, that when the subject of corporal punishment was going to crop up at a Committee meeting, he used to ask me to put it first on the agenda, so that he might wait outside until that burning question was disposed of: then he would join us--coming in to dessert, as we expressed it--and take his share in the discussion. Oh, if all colleagues were as reasonable! As _The Times_ truly said of him, “his sweetness of temper and social tact made him the most companionable of human beings.”
Mr. John Colam, for many years Secretary of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was a well-known figure in the zoophilist movement at the time of which I am speaking, and had a great reputation for astuteness. Wily he certainly was, with the vast experience he had acquired in evading the double pressure of those who cried “forward” and of those who cried “back”; and he was a veritable Proteus in the skill with which he gave the slip to any one who tried to commit him to any course but the safest. He used privately to allege the backwardness of his Committee as a cause for this seeming timidity; thus he told me in 1901, when the fate of the Royal Buckhounds was hanging in the balance, that the R.S.P.C.A. was unable to take any public action, not from any remissness on his part, but because certain members of the Committee were afraid of alienating subscribers, including King Edward himself. Personally I liked Mr. Colam; he was humane so far as his interests permitted, and when one had realized, once for all, the uselessness of attempting to bind him to any fixed purpose, it was instructive to have an occasional talk with him at Jermyn Street, and to observe the great adroitness with which he conducted the affairs of the Society; and he, on his part, when he saw that one had no longer any ethical designs on him, but approached him rather as a fellow-student, albeit a mere amateur, in the art of dealing with unreasonable people, would become chatty and confidential and tell amusing stories of a Secretary’s adventures. He would have made a successful Prime Minister, for his “wizardry” was of the highest order; as a humanitarian he left something to be desired.
With the Sporting League, which professed to discountenance “malpractices” in sport, yet opposed the Bill which would have prohibited rabbit-coursing and kindred pastimes, we were of course involved in controversy. We sought to bring this to a point by proposing a public discussion of the question: “What are malpractices in Sport?” But this challenge was declined, the _Sportsman_ expressing the opinion that “such piffling folly is best treated with contempt,” and the _Evening News_ that “cackling is the strong point of the faddists.” We were more successful in bringing to book some champions of aristocratic blood-sports, among them Sir Herbert Maxwell and Sir Edward Grey, who on one or two occasions appeared on neutral platforms, and seized the opportunity to eulogize their own favourite recreations, but showed little relish for the discussion which they themselves had provoked. Mr. F. G. Aflalo was another of our many antagonists in the magazines and the press; and I have a pleasant recollection of friendly encounters with him in the _Fortnightly Review_ and elsewhere. Many other apologists of blood-sports there were, of a more sentimental and unreasoning kind, and with these, too, we much enjoyed the argument, which was quite as good sport to us as their hunting or coursing was to them.
Before passing from Sports to Fashions, I will speak briefly of those popular places of recreation, known euphemistically as “Zoological Gardens,” which in a civilized age would surely be execrated as among the saddest and dullest spots on the earth, being, in fact, nothing cheerier than big convict-stations, to which the ill-fated life-prisoners--“stuff,” as the keepers call them--are conveyed from many distant lands. How any rational person can find pleasure in seeing, for example, “the lions fed” (the modern version of _Christianos ad leones_) is a mystery that baffles thought. I have not been to the London “Zoo” for a good many years; but when I knew it, the incongruities of the place were so ludicrous as almost to obscure one’s sense of its barbarity: the Tiger’s den, for instance, was labelled: “Beware of pickpockets,” and the Eagle’s cage bore the inscription: “To the Refreshment Rooms”; and there, sure enough, within sight of the captive Bird of Jove moping disconsolate on his perch, was a waiter, serving out coffees or lemon-squashes, regardless of the great Raptor by whom his predecessor, Ganymede, had been carried off to be the god’s cup-bearer. Could bathos have gone further?
A friend of mine who, as an Eton boy, used to go to the “Zoo” in the holidays and amuse himself by teasing the captives, was converted to humanitarian principles in a rather curious way. An elk, or some large animal of the ruminant order, whose wrath he had deservedly incurred, _coughed_ on him with such vehemence that he retired from the elk-house covered with a sort of moist bran, and with his top-hat irrevocably damaged. Though at the time this touched his hat rather than his heart, he afterwards came to regard the incident as what is called a “means of grace.” It caused _him_, too, to “ruminate,” and so brought home to him the fact that an elk is “a person.”
A pamphlet of mine, issued by the Humanitarian League in 1895, entitled “A Zoophilist at the Zoo,” was the beginning of an agitation which gradually led to a considerable improvement in the housing of the animals, in which discussion the most noteworthy feature was a series of articles contributed to the _Saturday Review_ by Mr. Edmund Selous, and afterwards reprinted by the League. Another subject, debated with much liveliness, was the practice of feeding pythons and other large serpents on living prey--ducks, fowls, rabbits, and even goats being given to the reptiles, to be devoured in a manner which was sickening to witness and almost too loathsome to describe.[35] These exhibitions were open till 1881; then for publicity extreme secrecy was substituted, and all inquiries were met by the stereotyped statement that the use of live prey was confined to cases “where such food was a necessity.”
Who feeds slim serpents must himself be slim.
The League found the reptile-feeders at Regent’s Park exceedingly slippery to deal with, and it needed long time, and much patience, to bring them to book. In this task, however, I was encouraged by the recollection of a scene which I once witnessed in a crowded railway-carriage, when a large eel had made its escape from a basket which one of my fellow-travellers was holding, and created a mild panic among the company by its convolutions under the seat. An old lady sharply upbraided the owner of the eel, and I was struck by the reasonableness of his reply in rather difficult circumstances, when the eel had repeatedly slipped from his grasp. “Wait a little, mum,” he said, “until he gets a bit dusty”; and the result proved the man to be right. In like manner we waited till the excuses given by the Zoological Society had become very dusty indeed.
Some of the reasons offered for the old system of snake-feeding were themselves truly reptilian. “We follow God’s ordinances, and they must be right,” was the reverent remark of a keeper; and humanitarians were told that “to declare the use of live food to be cruel is to bring that charge against the Designer of Nature Himself.” So deep and fervent was the piety of the Reptile House! Nevertheless, we continued to urge our point, and the subject was hotly debated at more than one of the Zoological Society’s annual meetings, where, as a result of the protests raised by Captain Alfred Carpenter, R.N., Mr. Stephen Coleridge, Mr. Rowland Hunt, and other F.Z.S.’s, it was made evident that the majority of the Fellows, who regarded the Society as a sort of private club, were indignant at public opinion being brought to bear upon their concerns. It was a situation not devoid of humour. I happen to know that in the course of an excited meeting held in November, 1907, when the Duke of Bedford, as President of the Zoological Society, was in the chair, the following telegram was despatched to his Grace:
Beg you to stand firm for live food and maintain the ordinances of the Creator.
_From_ ANNA CONDA.
This artless prayer of an unknown lady was fully in accord with the spirit of the meeting. Nevertheless, things moved, even in Regent’s Park; and, when we had shown that the snakes in the New York Zoological Park were successfully fed on freshly-killed animals, we had the satisfaction of seeing the same less barbarous method adopted at the London “Zoo.”
I once had the advantage of hearing some of the inner history of a large 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.