IXA LEAGUE OF HUMANENESS

Lost friends, to birds transfigured, skyward soar,Or fill the rocky wold with wailing cries.

But if such a vicissitude were to befall any of Mr. Hudson’s friends, I feel sure that, far from being dismayed by it, he would be able to continue his acquaintance with them on terms of entire understanding: they would in no sense be “lost” because they were feathered. To him a much more fearful prodigy is the savage fashion of wearing the skins and feathers of slaughtered birds as ornamental head-gear.

One of the most devoted followers of this new school of natural history, and himself a naturalist of distinction, was Dr. Alexander H. Japp, who, under the pen-name of “H. A. Page,” wrote the first account of Thoreau published in this country. I have a recollection of many pleasant chats with him, especially of a visit which he paid me with Mr. Walton Ricketson, the sculptor, a son of that intimate friend of Thoreau’s of whom I have spoken. Walton Ricketson was a boy at the time when Thoreau used to visit his father at New Bedford; but he was present on the occasion when the grave hermit of Walden surprised the company by a sudden hilarious impulse, which prompted him to sing “Tom Bowling” and to perform an improvised dance, in which, it is said, he kept time to the music but executed some steps more like those of the Indians than the usual ballroom figures.

Dr. Japp was also a biographer of De Quincey, and by his sympathetic understanding did much to correct the disparaging judgments passed on “the English opium-eater” by many critics and press-writers. As a result of a study of De Quincey which I published in 1904, I made the acquaintance, three years later, of Miss Emily de Quincey (she spelt her name in that manner), his last surviving daughter. She was a most charming old lady, full of vivacity and humour; and her letters, of which I received a good many, were written with a sprightliness recalling that of her father in his lighter moods; some of her reminiscences, too, were very interesting. She remembered the opiumdecanter and glass standing on the mantelpiece when she was a child, but she said that De Quincey quite left off the use of the drug for years before his death. She told me that the grudge against her father, which frequently found expression in “grotesque descriptions” of him, was caused in part by his neglect to answer the letters, many of a very flattering kind, addressed to him by readers of his books; a remissness which was due, not to any lack of courtesy or gratitude, but to his inveterate procrastination; he would always be going to write “to-morrow” or “when he had a good pen.” On one occasion an admirer wrote to him from Australia, begging him for “some truths” that he might give to his little son (who had been named after De Quincey) when he should be able to understand them. De Quincey said sadly to his daughter: “My dear, truths are very low with me just now. Do you think, if I sent a couple of lies, they would answer the purpose?” She feared that he never sent either truths or lies. Among the unanswered letters which her father received she recollected that there was one from “three brothers,” accompanied by a volume of poems by “Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.” It was by the poetry of Ellis that the De Quinceys were most struck, but not till years afterwards did they guess that those “brothers” were the Brontë sisters in disguise.

Were it not a common practice of reviewers, in estimating the work of a great writer, to omit, as far as possible, any mention of humane sympathies shown by him, it would be strange that De Quincey should be represented as a mere “dreamer” and visionary; for in truth, in spite of the transcendental Toryism of his politics, he was in several respects a pioneer of advanced humanitarian thought, especially in the question of corporal punishment, on which he spoke, a hundred years ago, with a dignity and foresight which might put to shame many purblind “progressives” of to-day. His profound regard for a suffering humanityis one of the noblest features in his writings; he rejoiced, for instance, at the interference of Parliament to amend the “ruinous social evil” of female labour in mines; and he spoke of the cruelty of that spirit which could look “lightly and indulgently on the affecting spectacle of female prostitution.” “All I have ever had enjoyment of in life,” he said, “seems to rise up to reproach me for my happiness, when I see such misery, and think there is so much of it in the world.” It is amusing to read animadversions on De Quincey’s “lack of moral fibre,” written by critics who lag more than a century behind him in some of the matters that afford an unequivocal test of man’s advance from barbarism to civilization.

Hommes, soyez humains. C’est votre premier devoir. Quelle sagesse y a-t-il pour vous, hors de l’humanité.—Rousseau.

FROMthe vaticinations of poets and prophets I now return to the actualities of the present state. Thirty years ago there were already in existence a number of societies which aimed at the humanizing of public opinion, in regard not to war only but to various other savage and uncivilized practices. The Vegetarian Society, founded in 1847, advocated a radical amendment; and the cause of zoophily, represented by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had been strengthened by the establishment of several Anti-Vivisection Societies. In like manner the philanthropic tendencies of the time, with respect to prison management and the punishment or reclamation of offenders, were reflected in the work of the Howard Association.

The purpose of the Humanitarian League, which was formed in 1891, was to proclaim ageneralprinciple of humaneness, as underlying the various disconnected efforts, and to show that though the several societies were necessarily working on separate lines, they were nevertheless inspired and united by a single bond of fellowship. The promoters of the League saw clearly that barbarous practices can be philosophically condemned on no other ground than that of the broad democratic sentiment of universal sympathy. Humanity and science between them have exploded the time-honouredidea of a hard-and-fast line between white man and black man, rich man and poor man, educated man and uneducated man, good man and bad man: equally impossible to maintain, in the light of newer knowledge, is the idea that there is any difference in kind, and not in degree only, between human and non-human intelligence. The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice will bring with it in due course the emancipation of animals also. The two reforms are inseparably connected, and neither can be fully realized alone.

We were well aware that a movement of this character would meet with no popular support; on the contrary, that those who took part in it would be regarded as “faddists” and “visionaries”; but we knew also that the direct opposite of this was the truth, and that while we were supposed to be merely building “castles in the air,” we were in fact following Thoreau’s most practical advice, andputting the foundations under them. For what is “the basis of morality,” as laid down by so great a thinker as Schopenhauer, except this very doctrine of a comprehensive and reasoned sympathy?

A year or two before the founding of the League, I had read at a meeting of the Fabian Society a paper on “Humanitarianism,” which afterwards formed a starting-point for the League’s publications. The idea of a humane society, with a wider scope than that of any previously existing body, was suggested by Mr. Howard Williams; and it was at the house of a very true friend of our cause, Mrs. Lewis (now Mrs. Drakoules), in Park Square, London, that a small group of persons, among whom were Mrs. Lewis, Mr. Edward Maitland, Mr. Howard Williams, Mr. Kenneth Romanes, and the present writer,[26]assembled, early in 1891, to draw up amanifesto and to launch the Humanitarian League. The title “humanitarian” was chosen because, though fully aware of certain objections to the word, we felt that it was the only term which sufficiently expressed our meaning, and that, whether a good name or a bad name, it must be taken up, like a gauntlet, by those who intended to fight for the cause which it denotes.

For it was to be a fighting, not a talking Society that the League was designed, even if it were a forlorn hope. In an interesting letter, read at the first meeting, the opinion was expressed by our veteran friend, Professor Francis W. Newman, that the time was not ripe for such a venture as the assertion of a humanitarian ethic; but we came to the conclusion that however small a beginning might be made, much good would be done by a systematic protest against the numerous barbarisms of the age—the cruelties inflicted by men on men, and the still more atrocious ill-treatment of the lower animals.

Edward Maitland, who, in spite of his advanced years, took a good deal of interest in our meetings, had had rather a remarkable career as traveller, writer, and mystic; and his earlier book,The Pilgrim and the Shrine, had been widely read. Those who knew him only as occultist would have been surprised to see how extremely critical he was—to the verge of fastidiousness—in discussing practical affairs; there was no one on that committee more useful in bringing the cold light of reason to bear on our consultations than the joint-author of Dr. Anna Kingsford’s very strange revelations. At the time I knew him, he was writing hismagnum opus, the Life of Anna Kingsford, and he would often discourse to me freely, after a committee meeting, on his spiritual experiences, to the astonishment, perhaps, of our fellow-travellers by rail or tram:on one occasion he described to me on the top of an omnibus how he had been privileged to be a beholder of the Great White Throne. There was something in these narrations so natural and genuine as to compel the respectful attention of the listener, whatever his personal belief might be as to the reality of the visions described.

Mr. Howard Williams, on the other hand, was as pronounced a rationalist as Maitland was a mystic, and one who by word and by pen, in private and in public, was a quiet but untiring champion of the humanitarian cause. HisEthics of Diet, which had the honour, at a later date, of being highly commended by Tolstoy, whose essay entitled “The First Step” was written as a preface to his Russian translation of the book, is a veritable mine of knowledge, which ranges over every period of history and covers not only the subject of humane dietetics but the whole field of man’s attitude toward the non-human races: if Ethical Societies were intended to be anything more than places of debate, they would long ago have included this work among their standard text-books. For the writing of such a treatise, Mr. Williams was specially qualified by the fact that with a wide classical knowledge he united in a remarkable degree the newer spirit and enthusiasm of humanity; he was in the truest sense a student and professor ofliteræ humaniores. It is difficult to estimate precisely the result of labours such as his; but that they have had an appreciable influence upon the growth of a more humane public opinion is not to be doubted.

The Committee was gradually strengthened by the inclusion of such experienced workers as the Rev. J. Stratton, Colonel W. Lisle B. Coulson, Mrs. L. T. Mallet, Mr. J. Frederick Green, Miss Elizabeth Martyn, the first secretary of the League, and Mr. Ernest Bell, a member of the well-known publishing firm and now President of the Vegetarian Society, who for over twentyyears was a bulwark of strength as chairman and treasurer. A campaign against the Royal Buckhounds had at once commanded respect; the pamphlets were well noticed in the press—better, perhaps, in those days, when they were still a novelty, than later, when they were taken as a matter of course—some successful meetings were held, and the general interest shown in the League’s doings was out of all proportion to its numerical strength.

It was in 1895 that the second phase of the League’s career began with the acquirement of an office in Great Queen Street, and the institution of a monthly journal,Humanity, so-called at first because its later title,The Humanitarian, was at that time appropriated elsewhere. The holding of a National Humanitarian Conference, at St. Martin’s Town Hall, in the same year, was the first big public effort that the League had made, and attracted a good deal of attention; and the scope of the work was considerably extended by the appointment of special departments for dealing with such subjects as Sports, Criminal Law and Prison Reform, Humane Diet and Dress, and the Education of Children; and by a much wider use of the press as a medium for propaganda, in which sphere the League was now able to avail itself of the services of Mr. Joseph Collinson, whose numerous press letters soon became a distinctive feature of its work. In the summer of 1897 the League shifted its headquarters to Chancery Lane, where it remained till it was brought to an end in 1919.

The League was soon engaged in controversies of various kinds. A little book entitledAnimals’ Rights, which I wrote at the request of my friend, Mr. Ernest Bell, and which was published by his firm in 1892, led to a great deal of discussion, and passed through numerous editions, besides being translated into French, German, Dutch, Swedish, and other languages. Among its earliest critics was Professor D. G. Ritchie, who, in his work onNatural Rights, maintained that though“we may be said to have duties ofkindness towardsthe animals, it is incorrect to represent these as strictlyduties towardsthe animals themselves, as if they had rights against us.” (The italics are Mr. Ritchie’s.) There is a puzzle for you, reader. I took it to mean that, in man’s duty of kindness, it is the kindness only that has reference to the animals, the duty being a private affair of the man’s; the convenience of which arrangement is that the man can shut off the kindness whenever it suits him to do so, the kindness being, as it were, the water, and the duty the tap. For instance, when the question of vivisection arose, Mr. Ritchie at once turned off the water of kindness, though it had been very liberally turned on by him when he gave approval to the humanitarian protests against the barbarities of sport.

To this sophistical hair-splitting, in a matter of much practical importance, we from the first refused to yield, and made it plain that it was no battle of words in which we were engaged but one of ethical conduct, and that while we were quite willing to exchange the term “rights” for a better one, if better could be found, we would not allow the concept either of human “duties” or of animals’ “rights” to be manipulated in the manner of which Mr. Ritchie’s book gave a conspicuous example. Meanwhile the word “rights” held the field.

The old Catholic school was, of course, antagonistic to the recognition of animals’ rights, and we had controversies with Monsignor John S. Vaughan, among other sacerdotalist writers, when he laid down the ancient proposition that “beasts exist for the use and benefit of man.” It may be doubted whether argument is not a pure waste of time, when there is a fundamental difference of opinion as to data and principles: the sole reason for such debate was to ensure that the humanitarian view of the question was rightly placed before the public, and to show how strange was thealliance between sacerdotalist and vivisector. Evolutionary science has demonstrated beyond question the kinship of all sentient life; yet the scientist, in order to rake together a moral defence for his doings, condescends to take shelter under the same plea as the theologian, and having got rid of the old anthropocentric fallacy in the realm of science avails himself of that fallacy in the realm of ethics: a progressive in one branch of thought, he is still a medievalist in another.

Thus scientist and sacerdotalist between them would perpetuate the experimental tortures of the laboratory.Laborare est orarewas the old saying; now it should be expanded by the Catholic school of vivisectionists intolaboratorium est oratorium: the house of torture is the house of prayer. It is a beautiful and touching scene of reconciliation, this meeting of priest and professor over the torture-trough of the helpless animal. They might exclaim in Tennyson’s words:

There above the little grave,O there above the little grave,We kissed again with tears.

More exhilarating was the discussion when Mr. G. K. Chesterton entered the lists as champion of those high prerogatives of Mankind, which he saw threatened by the sinister devices of humanitarians, who, as he has explained in one of his books, “uphold the claims of all creatures against those of humanity.” A debate with Mr. Chesterton took place in the Essex Hall; and for several years afterwards the argument was renewed at times, as, for instance, when reviewing a book of mine onThe Logic of Vegetarianism, he insisted[27]that “the difference between our moral relation to men and to animals is not a difference of degree in the least: it is a difference of kind.” The human race, he held, is a definite society, different from everything else. “The man who breaks a cat’s back breaks a cat’s back. Theman who breaks a man’s back breaks an implied treaty.” To us, this terse saying of Mr. Chesterton’s seemed to contain unintentionally the root of all cruelty to animals, the quintessence of anthropocentric arrogance. The man who breaks a cat’s back, breaks a cat’s back. Yes, and the scientist who vivisects a dog, vivisects a dog; the sportsman who breaks up a hare, breaks up a hare. That is all. The victims are not human. But it is a distinction which has caused, in savage hands, the immemorial ill-usage of the lower animals through the length and breadth of the world.

Perhaps the strangest of Mr. Chesterton’s charges against humanitarians was one which he made in his bookOrthodoxy, that their trend is “to touch fewer and fewer things,” i.e. to abstain from one action after another until they are left in a merely negative position. He failed to see that while we certainly desire to touch fewer and fewer things with whip, hob-nailed boot, hunting-knife, scalpel, or pole-axe, we equally desire to get into touch with more and more of our fellow-beings by means of that sympathetic intelligence which tells us that they are closely akin to ourselves. Why, ultimately, do we object to such practices as vivisection, blood-sports, and butchery? Because of the cruelty inseparable from them, no doubt; but also because of the hateful narrowing of our own human pleasures which these barbarous customs involve. A recognition of the rights of animals implies no sort of disparagement of human rights: this indeed was clearly indicated in the sub-title of my book,Animals’ Rights“considered in relation to social progress.”

During the winter of 1895-96, a course of lectures on “Rights,” as viewed from various standpoints—Christian, ethical, secularist, scientific, theosophical, and humanitarian—was organized by the Humanitarian League; and of these perhaps the most significant was Mr. Frederic Harrison’s address on the ethical view, in which it was maintained that “man’s moralitytowards the lower animals is a vital and indeed fundamental part of his morality towards his fellow-men.” At this same meeting some discussion arose on the far from unimportant question of nomenclature, objection being taken to Mr. Harrison’s use of the term “brute,” which he, on his part, defended as being scientifically correct, and, in the sense of “inarticulate,” wholly void of offence, even when applied to such highly intelligent beings as the elephant, the horse, or the dog. Humanitarians, however, have generally held that the meaning of the word “brute,” in this connection, is not “inarticulate” but “irrational,” and that for this reason it should be discarded, on the ground that to call an animal a brute, or irrational, is the first step on the path to treating him accordingly. “Give a dog a bad name,” says the proverb; and directly follows the injunction: “and hang him.”

For like reasons the Humanitarian League always looked with disfavour on the expression “dumb animals,” because, to begin with, animals are not dumb, and secondly, nothing more surely tends to their depreciation than thus to attribute to them an unreal deficiency or imperfection: such a term may be meant to increase our pity, but in the long run it lessens what is more important, our respect. In this matter the League was glad to have the support of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, who, as long ago as 1877, had written satirically in theAthenæumof what he called “the great human fallacy” conveyed in the words “the dumb animals,” and had pointed out that animals are no more dumb than men are. Years afterwards he wrote to me to inquire about the authorship of an article in theHumanitarianin which the same conclusion was reached, and expressed his full sympathy with our point of view.

But much more difficult to contend with than any anti-humanitarian arguments is the dull dead weight of that unreasoning prejudice which cannot see consanguinityexcept in the conventional forms, and simply does not comprehend the statement that “the animals” are our fellow-beings. There are numbers of good and kindly folk with whom, on this question, one never reaches the point of difference at all, but is involved in impenetrable misapprehensions: there may be talking on either side, but communication there is none. Tell them, in Howard Moore’s words, that the non-human beings are “not conveniences but cousins,” and they will answer, assentingly, that they are all in favour of “kindness to animals”; after which they will continue to treat them not as cousins but as conveniences. This impossibility of even making oneself intelligible was brought home to me with great force, some years ago, in connection with the death of a very dear friend, a cat, whose long life of fifteen years had to be ended in the chloroform-box owing to an incurable ailment. The veterinary surgeon whose aid I invoked was an extremely kind man, for whose skill I shall always feel grateful; and from his patience and sympathetic manner I thought he partly understood what the occasion meant to me—that, like a human death-bed, it was a scene that could never pass from the mind. It was, therefore, with something of an amused shock that I recollected, after he had gone, what I had hardly noticed at the moment, that he had said to me, as he left the door: “You’ll be wanting a new pussy-cat soon.”

Richard Jefferies has remarked that the belief that animals are devoid of reason is rarely held by those who themselves labour in the fields: “It is the cabinet-thinkers who construct a universe of automatons.” One is cheered now and then by hearing animals spoken of, quite simply and naturally, as rational beings. I once made the acquaintance, in the Lake District, of an old lady living in a roadside cottage, who had for her companion, sitting in an armchair by the fire, a lame hen, named Tetty, whom she had saved and rearedfrom chicken-hood. Some years later, as I passed that way, I called and inquired after Tetty, but learnt that she was dead. “Ah, poor Tetty!” said the dame, as tears fell from her eyes; “she passed away several months ago, quite conscious to the end.” That to attribute to a dying bird the self-consciousness which is supposed to be the special prerogative of mankind, should, to the great majority of persons, appear nothing less than comical, is a measure of the width of that gulf which religion has delved between “the beasts that perish” and the Christian with his “soul” to save.

But it is not often that one hears of a case like that of Tetty: as a rule, disappointment lurks in the hopes that flatter the humanitarian mind. We had a neighbour in Surrey, an old woman living in an adjoining cottage, who professed full adherence to our doctrine that cats should not be allowed to torture captured birds. “I always take them away from my cat: I can’t bear to see them suffering,” she said. We warmly approved of this admirable sentiment. But then, as she turned aside, she added quietly: “Unless, of course, they’re sparrows.”

A year or two ago the papers described a singular accident at a railway station, where a cow got on the line and was wedged between the platform and a moving train: the cow, we were told, was killed, “but fortunately there was no personal injury”—a view of the occurrence which seemed, to a humanitarian, still stranger than the accident itself.

Here, again, is an instance of unintended humour: “Homeward Bound” as the title of a cheerful picture in which a bronzed sailor is represented returning from the tropics, carrying—a caged parrot.

It is this traditional habit of regarding the lower animals not as persons and fellow-beings, but as automata and “things,” that lies behind the determined refusal to recognize that they have rights, and is thus ultimately responsible for much of the callousnesswith which they are treated. With this superstition the League was in conflict from the first.

But perhaps some of my readers may still think that time spent on the rights of animals is so much taken away from the great human interests that are at stake. Let us help men first, they may argue, and then, when mankind is righted, we can help the animals after. On the other hand, there are some zoophilists who take the contrary view that men can help themselves, and that it is the animals first and foremost who need aid and protection. The League’s opinion was that both these arguments are mistaken, and, for the same reason, viz. that, in our complex modern society, all great issues of justice or injustice are crossed and intermingled, so that no one cruelty can be singled out as the source of all other cruelties, nor can any one reform be fully realized apart from the rest. By “humanitarian” we meant one who feels and acts humanely, not towards mankind only, or the lower animals only, but towards all sentient life—one who adopts the Humanitarian League’s principle that “it is iniquitous to inflict avoidable suffering on any sentient being.” We did not regard as humanitarians, for example, those “philanthropic” persons who, having made a fortune by commercial competition, in which the depreciation of wages was a recognized method, afterwards gave back a portion of their wealth in “charity.” This might, perhaps, be philanthropy, but it did not seem to be quite humanity. Nor did we think that the name “humanitarian” should be given to those zoophilists or animal lovers who keep useless and pampered animals as pets and playthings, wasting on them time and money which might be better spent elsewhere, and indeed wasting the lives of the animals themselves, for animals have their own lives to live as men have.

Perhaps the most able of all vindications of humane principles is that contained in Mr. Howard Moore’sThe Universal Kinship, published by the League in1906. It was through a notice which I wrote in theHumanitarianof an earlier book of his,Better-World Philosophy, that the League first came into association with him; and I remember with shame that when that “sociological synthesis,” as its sub-title proclaimed it to be, first came into my hands, I nearly left it unread, suspecting it to be but the latest of the many wearisome ethical treatises that are a scourge to the reviewer, to whom the very word “sociology” or “synthesis” is a terror. But fortunately I read the book, and quickly discovered its merits; and from that time, till his death in 1916, Howard Moore was one of the truest and tenderest of our friends, himself prone to despondency and, as his books show, with a touch of pessimism, yet never failing in his support and encouragement of others and of all humanitarian effort. “What on earth would we Unusuals do, in this lonely dream of life,” so he wrote in one of his letters, “if it were not for the sympathy and friendship of the Few?”

Howard Moore died by his own hand (he had good reason for his action); and the timorous attitude which so many people adopt towards suicide was shown in the silence on this point which was maintained in most of the English zoophilist journals which mentioned his death: one editor hit upon the sagacious announcement that “he died very suddenly,” which deserves, I think, to be noted as a consummate instance of how the truth may be truthfully obscured.

InThe Universal Kinship, Howard Moore left to humanitarians a treasure which it will be their own fault if they do not value as it deserves. There is a tendency to forget that it is to modern evolutionary science that the ethic of humaneness owes its strongest corroboration. The physical basis of the humane philosophy rests on the biological fact that kinship is universal. Starting from this admitted truth, Moore showed, with much wealth of argument and epigram, that the supposed psychical gulf between human andnon-human has no more existence, apart from the imagination of man, than the physical gulf which has now been bridged by science. The purpose of our movement was admirably stated by him: “to put science and humanitarianism in place of tradition and savagery.” It was with that aim in view that our League of Humaneness had been formed.

Why not bring back at once the boot, the stake, and the thumbscrew?—Professor Lawson Tait.

ITis among the proudest boasts of this country that torture is not permitted within its borders: “Torture,” wrote Macaulay, “was inflicted for the last time in the month of May, 1640.” But pleasant though it is to think that it was in the beautiful springtime that the barbarous practice came to an end, this is unfortunately one of the cases in which our people allow themselves to be beguiled and fooled by very transparent quibbles; for a few minutes’ thought would suffice to convince the most complacent of Britons that while some specialized forms of judicial torture have been abandoned, other tortures, some of them not less painful and fully as repulsive, are being inflicted to this day—nearly three hundred years after the glorious date of abolition. For if “torture,” as etymology and the dictionaries and common usage tell us, means nothing more or less than the forcible infliction of extreme pain, it is not a technicality but an absurdity to pretend that it finds no place among twentieth-century institutions.

Flogging is torture in a most literal sense, and in one of its grossest shapes: the “cat,” as Mr. G. K. Chesterton has well said, is “the rack without any of its intellectual reasons.”[28]The horror of the old navaland military lashings is within the memory of many officers who were compelled to witness them: how is the punishment any less savage in its nature because it is now administered in a less severe degree, and on men convicted of robbery with violence or some breach of prison discipline? In one of the Parliamentary debates of November, 1912, a Member who had been invited by the Home Secretary to examine the “cat,” gave it as his opinion that “ifthatis not torture, then I do not know what torture is.”

In the gloomiest but most impressive of his stories,The Island of Dr. Moreau, Mr. H. G. Wells has represented his savage “beast-folk” as monotonously chanting a certain “idiotic formula” about the infallibility of “the Law.” With nothing more fitly than with this can be compared the undying legend, now over half a century old, that “garrotting was put down by the lash.” It is not often that a popular fallacy, however erroneous it may be, can be actually disproved; but in this particular case such refutation was possible, in the certified fact that the garrotting “epidemic” of 1862 had been suppressed by the ordinary lawbeforeflogging for that offence was legalized. For many years the Humanitarian League issued a public challenge on the subject, and made the facts known in thousands of press letters; the challenge was quietly ignored, and the false statement repeated, till it was plain that, as De Quincey remarked, “rarer than the phœnix is that virtuous man who will consent to lose a prosperous story on the consideration that it happens to be a lie.” One such virtuous man, however, and one only, was found, namely, Mr. Montague Crackanthorpe, who actually recanted the statement which he could not substantiate.[29]In view of his unique candour, it was suggested after his death that a statue should be erected to his memory.

Very different from the course taken by Mr.Crackanthorpe was the action of Sir Alexander Wood Renton, of the Supreme Court of Ceylon, who, in an article on “Corporal Punishment,” introduced into theEncyclopædia Britannicaof 1910 that very garrotting legend from which it had previously been kept free, and made the further mistake of giving the date of the Flogging Act of 1863 as 1861, thus lending to his blunder a misleading appearance of plausibility. When called to account, he was content to maintain a masterly silence—more eloquent than words—and to allow his misstatement, unacknowledged and uncorrected, to continue to keep alive a prevalent superstition. Can it be wondered that such fallacies persist, when a Chief Justice will thus lie low rather than admit himself at fault?

It is an amusing fact, and far too little known, that the text which has long lent a sanctity to the use of corporal punishment, is not taken, as supposed, from theProverbsof Solomon, but from a passage, and a rather unseemly one, in Butler’sHudibras(1663):[30]this, however, is as it should be, for it is fitting that an indecent practice should claim authority from an indecent source. Thus encouraged, and with this divine precept in their thoughts, parents and schoolmasters, and magistrates, and judges, and all governors and rulers, have felt that in wielding the rod they were discharging a religious obligation, and not, as might otherwise have been suspected, gratifying some very primitive instincts of their own. For “the Wisdom of Solomon” has been quoted as our guide, in the correction of the old as well as of the young; indeed, as a writer in thePeoplesagely remarked, “the older the evildoer, the more his need of the birch.” On this principle, aged vagrants have on various occasions been sentenced to be corrected with the rod; but itis to the young that the blessings of the birch more properly belong.

Our British boys, from shore to shore,Two priceless boons may find:The Flag that’s ever waved before,The Birch that’s waved behind.

In its campaign against flogging in the Royal Navy, the Humanitarian League gained not only a considerable success, but an amount of entertainment which of itself would have more than repaid the labour expended on the work. To begin with, there was the technical quibble, very characteristic of officialdom, that though the backs of boys, or rather of young men, might be cut into ribbons with the birch, there was no “flogging” in the Navy, for “flogging” meant the infliction not of the birch but of the “cat.” With Mr. Swift MacNeill conducting the attack in the House of Commons, it may be imagined that such prevarications—and there were many similar instances—fared but badly; and it was no surprise when “these degrading practices,” as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman described them, were brought to an end in 1906, though the use of the cane, to the discredit of the Admiralty, is still permitted and defended.

In this long controversy the League was brought into conflict with all sorts of opponents, among them several Admirals, of whom the “breeziest” were the Hon. V. A. Montagu and Sir William Kennedy. With the latter especially we had great fun, as we found in him an antagonist of the utmost heartiness and good humour. “Of what use is it,” he wrote to me, “sending me all this rubbish, except to fill the waste-paper basket? I don’t care a damn for Admiral——’s opinion.” On another occasion he sent me a formal challenge to meet him “at any time and place, when pistols and coffee will be provided.” At a later date we had his support,equally emphatic, in our protest against the practice of feeding snakes on live prey at the “Zoo.”

Other friends, too, helped to lend gaiety to a rather dismal subject. Among those who actively co-operated with the League was a commercial traveller, who was deeply versed in the various laws relating to corporal punishment, and who, as he once confided to me, had been in the habit of working locally as a sort of freelance and Bashi-Bazouk. He had made a practice, for example, of writing “How about the Birch?” on the Admiralty’s printed notices in which boys were invited to reap the benefits of joining the Navy; and this had touched so sore a point that the advertisements in question had at length been put within glass frames. Another of his little jokes was to write to private schoolmasters, saying that he had a son whom he was about to send to school (which was true), and asking whether they could guarantee that there would be no corporal punishment. Several masters responded favourably, but as the boy could not be sent to more than one place of education, these worthy folk were deprived of theirquid pro quo; in the end, however, a nemesis fell upon their betrayer, for once, when he had just returned home after a long journey, tired, and wanting above everything his tea, who should be announced but one of those very pedagogues with whom he had been in communication. He too had travelled some distance, rather than miss the chance of a pupil, and, having “ideas” on the subject of corporal punishment, had come, as he said, for “a good talk.” “I could have eaten him,” was our friend’s remark.

In the ’nineties of last century, the state of the Criminal Law, as Mr. Justice Mathew pointed out, was a hundred years behind the times, and a special department of the Humanitarian League was established in order to advocate certain much-needed reforms. It was felt that in view of the severity of the penal laws, the inequality of sentences, and the hard and indiscriminatingcharacter of prison discipline, an organized attempt ought to be made to humanize both the spirit of the law and the conditions of prison life, and to show that the true purpose of imprisonment was the reformation, not the mere punishment, of the offender. In this campaign the League was able to avail itself of a mass of expert information. It published, in 1893, a very effective pamphlet, “I was in Prison,” written by Mr. Robert Johnson, director of the Colonial College at Hollesley Bay; and this was followed, a year later, by “A Plea for Mercy to Offenders,” an address given before the League by Mr. C. H. Hopwood, the Recorder of Liverpool, who, with his friend Mr. Johnson, did great service in showing the futility of long sentences of imprisonment. I had several talks about that time with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hopwood; and they would have thrown in their lot altogether with the Humanitarian League but for their fear that the inclusion within its programme of many other questions, such as sport and vivisection, would alienate sympathy in some quarters from their special subject of prison reform: it was for this reason that Mr. Hopwood afterwards founded the Romilly Society.

Two other names stood out conspicuously in the same sphere of work—that of Dr. W. Douglas Morrison, the well-known criminologist, now Rector of Marylebone, under whose guidance the League took a prominent part in the agitation which led to the Prisons Act of 1898, and that of “Lex,” one of the keenest intellects of his time, whose pen was placed unreservedly at the League’s disposal. Mr. W. H. S. Monck—for it was he who adopted thatnom de plume—was Chief Registrar in Bankruptcy in the King’s Bench Division, Dublin, a post which he filled with distinction, while his extraordinarily active and versatile mind found interest in many other studies: he was a mathematician, an astronomer, a writer on logic, political economy, and moral philosophy, and withal a chess-player ofnote, among which pursuits he never failed to find time to help the humanitarian cause. His official position made it desirable that his name should not appear; but many were the press letters that he wrote, and many the resolutions, memorials, and letters to governmental departments that he drafted on the League’s behalf. To “ask ‘Lex’ to draft it” was often the course taken by the Committee when dealing with some technical matter that needed exceptional care. The two subjects in which Mr. Monck was specially concerned, besides that of flogging, were the establishment of a Court of Criminal Appeal and a revision of the law relating to Imprisonment for Debt; and it was largely his unacknowledged labours that brought about the one reform and prepared the way for the other. In his press letters on corporal punishment he would sometimes adopt the ironic manner; that is, he would write as one who in part believed in the value of flogging, yet in such a way as to suggest rather the flaws and failures of the practice, and so to impair any faith in it which might linger in the minds of his readers.

Among other friends to whom this department of the League was much indebted were Mr. George Ives, author ofA History of Penal Methods; Mrs. H. Bradlaugh Bonner; Mr. Carl Heath; Mr. H. B. Montgomery; Mrs. L. T. Mallet; Dr. T. Baty, the distinguished authority on International Law; and Mr. Joseph Collinson, who for some years acted as its honorary secretary. Mr. Collinson was a young north-countryman, self-taught, and full of native readiness and ingenuity, who at an early age had developed a passion for humanitarian journalism, and whose press letters became as well known as those of Mr. Algernon Ashton, while he had a marked advantage over that gentleman in having an ethical purpose and something definite to write about. Any one who should glance over the files of the chief London and provincial journals, between the years 1895 and 1910, could not fail to see a number of letterssigned “Joseph Collinson,” or to admire the pertinacity with which the humanitarian view of a host of controversial subjects, in particular those relating to criminal law and prisons, was brought to the notice of the public. Especially in regard to the flogging question Mr. Collinson’s services were of great value.

Thus supported, the Humanitarian League had no cause to fear any reasoned opposition: our difficulty, rather, was to meet with any; for our antagonists were mostly anonymous and often abusive correspondents of newspapers, and the real obstacle with which we had to cope was the crass weight of prejudice and the immense stability of old institutions. Two of our adversaries, however, must not go without mention. One was Mr. William Tallack, then Secretary of the Howard Association, whose hostility was dangerous because it lurked under the guise of philanthropy. He was an old gentleman of benevolent demeanour, whose method it was to sit astutely “on the fence,” making oracular utterances, now on that side, now on this, so that, like the writer of an astrological almanack, he might be able in any event to run in and cry: “I told you so.” In hisPenological Principles, a work much advertised in those days, there was plenty of penology, but very little principle, much more of the Tallack than of the Howard: it was, in fact, a farrago of platitudes and pieties, which said many things without ultimately meaning anything at all. Yet, in spite of his much verbiage and many estimable sentiments, Mr. Tallack was a reactionist; he belonged to an antiquated school of thought, quite out of sympathy with the new style of prison reform; and as he lost no opportunity of disparaging the work of the League, we showed him somewhat emphatically that that was a game at which two parties could play. This he did not relish, especially as we were strongly backed up by Mr. Passmore Edwards in his paper, theEcho. A conference was accordingly proposed by Mr. Tallack, where it was agreed that infuture there should be a friendly arrangement of “hands off” on either side. I remember how, at that meeting, he told me in his paternal manner, as an instance of the advantages of not advocating “extreme” measures of reform, that he enjoyed the privilege of being able, now and then, to have a personal talk with the Home Secretary. “What would humanitarians think of that?” The old gentleman was evidently unaware that if he was apersona grataat the Home Office, it was precisely because he was known to be a “tame” reformer, a parasite of the old system, not a champion of the new, and therefore useful to those who wished to let matters go on as before.

In a prison-play “The Home Secretary’s Holiday,” which was acted before the Humanitarian League at one of its social gatherings, Mr. Tallack was glanced at in the character of Mr. Prim, a Visiting Justice, who dwells on the value of “segregation,” “introspection,” “self-questioning,” and “remorse,” as heaven-sent means by which the convicted sinner may be awakened to a sense of his guilt.

Our other critic, of whom I must say a brief word, was Sir Robert Anderson, then an ex-Assistant Commissioner of Police; who, being of a choleric and over-bearing nature, was consumed with wrathful indignation at the activities of the Humanitarian League. In his book onCriminals and Crime, vengeful tirades against the professional criminal were accompanied with scarcely less violent abuse of “professional humanitarians”—a strange term this, to be applied to honorary workers in an unpopular cause, and by one who had himself been for many years a salaried official at Scotland Yard! In the same work we figured variously as “humanity-mongers,” “agitators,” “fools,” “hysterical faddists,” “doctrinaire philanthropists,” “spurious philosophers,” “maudlin sentimentalists,” and so on. Authors sometimes describe their books as “a labour of love.” Sir Robert’s wascertainly a labour of hate, and among the punishments which he indicated as suitable for an impenitent thief were the gallows, crucifixion, thumb-screws, and the rack; he added that it was consideration for the community, not for the thief, that prevented the use of them. It is not pleasant to have to speak of such a man; one would rather forget him. But in estimating the savagery of the age, the fact that his most vindictive proposals met with a good deal of public support is one which cannot be left out of account.

A thorough-going condemnation of flogging is without doubt a very unpopular policy; the Humanitarian League lost many members and much pecuniary support by its steadfastness on this point, especially, strange to say, among zoophilists and anti-vivisectionists, many of whom were firm believers in the propriety of vivisecting the backs of criminals, and would have gone any distance, as I have heard said, “to see a vivisector flogged.” Not the least valuable part of the League’s duties was to put a check on foolish talk of that sort; and in this we had the satisfaction of being warmly supported by so distinguished an opponent of vivisection as Professor Lawson Tait. It came about in a rather strange way.

The League held a meeting in Birmingham; and a local member, who had the arrangements in hand, got Mr. Tait to preside, but by some oversight did not sufficiently apprise him beforehand of our aims and objects. When he entered the room—a formidable-looking figure, with slow gait, massive build, and heavy brows—he was seen to be in a towering rage. The storm broke at once. Instead of the usual complimentary remarks from the chair, he told us in wrathful tones that he knew nothing of the Humanitarian League, and that it was most improper that he should have been left thus uninformed. This was true, and we wished the earth would swallow us up; but there was nothing for it but to go on with the business of the meeting,and while the speeches were being made Mr. Tait sat and studied the League’s printed manifesto. As he read it, the gloom gradually left him; he began to mutter approval of point after point, then to chuckle with satisfaction, and presently he turned to me (I happened to be sitting next to him) and told me that he was in complete agreement with our programme. A great good humour now took the place of his former resentment, and presently he spoke at some length, and himself moved a resolution that the objects of the League were “worthy the support of all good citizens.” He declared that he felt almost as strongly on the question of prison punishments as on that of vivisection, and severely censured the clamour for the lash that had been raised by some woman-suffragists of Edinburgh. It was then that he used the words prefixed to this chapter: “Why not bring back at once the boot, the stake, and the thumbscrew?”

That there are numbers of persons who would be quite willing to bring back, if it were possible, the medieval forms of torture cannot for a moment be doubted by any one who, like myself, has had the experience of working for over twenty-five years for the discontinuance of flogging. There are, of course, many reasonable advocates of corporal punishment in one or another of its forms; but there are many more to whom the cry for flogging, and for more and yet more flogging, has become a veritable craze, as was seen when, in the agitation for the lashing of “white slavers” in 1912, a frenzied shriek of passion went up from a large section of the people. “We know,” said a Member of Parliament at the time, “the extraordinary hysterical emotion which this Bill has aroused throughout England. We get letters from all sorts of people, chiefly women, ‘flog them,’ ‘crucify them,’ and anything else you like. It is a cry we have had all down the ages.”[31]That there has been such a cry all down the ages is likely enough; but the age which tolerates it can hardly claim to be a civilized one.

InThe Flogging Craze, a Statement of the Case against Corporal Punishment,[32]a book published for the Humanitarian League in 1916, with a preface by my friend Sir George Greenwood, I availed myself of the large amount of material amassed by the League during its long campaign against flogging, in the hope that such a work—the first of its kind, if pamphlets be excepted—might prove useful to many social reformers, who, though instinctively opposed to the use of the lash, are often silenced by confident assertions of its efficacy, and are unaware that in this, as in similar discussions, humanity and reason go hand in hand.

Let me now turn to another and still more gruesome form of torture. It is fitting, perhaps, that the twin tyrannies of Flogging and Vivisection should be linked together as Lawson Tait saw them, for they are indeed kindred expressions of one barbarous spirit. I use, for the sake of brevity and convenience, the customary term “vivisection,” though there is force in the objection raised against it by certain humanitarian writers, that the Latin word somewhat conceals the vileness of the practice, and though the phrase suggested by Mr. Howard Williams, “experimental torture,” is more strictly appropriate to the nameless thing for which a name has to be found. Here, at any rate, in the twentieth century of our barbarism, is torture in its most naked form—the rack, not indeed “without any of its intellectual reasons,” as was said of the lash, but torture as surely as the boot and the thumbscrew were torture. As for the intellectual reasons alleged in excuse of the practice, it was pointed out inAnimals’ Rightsthat before holding vivisection justified on the strength of its utility, a wise man will take into consideration the other, themoralside of thequestion, “the hideous injustice of torturing a sentient animal, and the wrong thereby done to the humane sense of the community.” This contention was quoted and corroborated in an unexpected quarter, viz. in a book published in 1901 by a Russian doctor, V. Veresaeff,[33]who, though himself justifying vivisection, did not conceal his misgivings as to the ethical aspect of the practice. “The question,” he said, in reference to the passage inAnimals’ Rights, “is plainly put, and there can be no room for any equivocation. I repeat that we ought not to ridicule the pretensions of the anti-vivisectionists—the sufferings of animals are truly horrible; and sympathy with them is not sentimentality.” In view of that admission, I will waste no words in discussing the pretence that anæsthetics have relieved the vivisected animals of their “truly horrible” sufferings. It is not so, even in this country, where the legal restrictions are a farce; and if it were so here, the rest of the world would be open to experimentation unlicensed and unlimited.

The special application of the word “vivisection” to physiological experiments has led to a belief, in many minds, that the vivisecting scientist is the sole torturer of animals. This is unjust both to the laboratory and to its victims. The crusade against vivisection would be much strengthened if those who take part in it would remember that the cruelties of science are only part of the great sum of cruelty that in various forms disgraces the dealings of mankind with the lower animals. Granted that the worst barbarities of the vivisector exceed those of the sportsman or the slaughterman, both in duration and intensity, it is still a fact, as scientists have often pointed out, that there are other tortures than those of the laboratory, and that to some of these the name “vivisection” might as accurately be applied. For example, clumsy castration of domesticanimals, as the law is beginning to recognize, is nothing less than “farmyard vivisection”; the “docking” of horses’ tails is vivisection in a very revolting form; in the seal-fishery the wretched victims of “fashion” have often been skinned alive; nor can it be pretended that the torture of the egrets, flung aside to die when their nuptial plumes have been torn off, demands a milder name than vivisection; yet some zoophilists, who look upon a vivisecting physiologist as a fiend, do not hesitate to wear an aigrette or a sealskin cloak, or to be the owners of docked horses or cropped dogs. It is impossible to draw a strict line of division between those barbarities which amount to torture and those which fall short of it, and it is convenient that the cruelties of sport and fashion should be dealt with under a separate head; nevertheless there is one other practice on which a few words must be spoken before this chapter is closed.

Under the antiquated methods of transport and butchery still permitted in England, it is impossible to doubt that something not far removed from torture is often practised in the cattle trade; for which reason, while aware that in vegetarianism lies the only full solution of the diet-question, humanitarians have long pressed for an amelioration of the worst features of cattle-ship and shambles, and, as a minimum, for the establishment of public abattoirs in place of private slaughterhouses. Even in this respect, owing to the supineness of the County Council, London has been left at the mercy of “the trade,” though in some other districts there has been a gratifying improvement. The Humanitarian League, enjoying the advantage of being advised by such experts as Sir Benjamin Richardson, Mr. H. F. Lester (whoseBehind the Scenes in Slaughterhouseswe published in 1892), Mr. Charles W. Forward, Mr. C. Cash, and Mr. R. S. Ayling, lost no opportunity of making known the need of this long postponed reform; but the subject beingso repulsive it was always difficult to enlist the sympathies of the public, that is, of the very persons whose conscience ought to have been touched; or, if any interestwasawakened, it might be among those who were traditionally or professionally opposed to the changes desired.

This danger was once curiously illustrated at a meeting held by the League in the rooms of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, when Mr. John Colam, the Secretary of that Society, took the chair, and Mr. C. W. Forward gave an address on the Jewish method of slaughtering. A mere handful of our friends attended, but the hall was packed from end to end with Jewish visitors, who had seen the announcement of the meeting in the papers, and rallied to the defence of their ritual. We had intended to move a resolution, strongly condemning the Jewish system, but we decided, after a hurried consultation with Mr. Colam, that an academic discussion would better suit the circumstances; and fortunately it did not occur to our Hebrew friends to propose and pass a resolution of the contrary kind: they talked long and volubly, and we were glad they did nothing worse. The meeting, however, was not without result, for it led, a couple of months later, to the reception by the Jewish Board of Shecheta of a deputation from the Humanitarian League, at which the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Adler, was present, and gave us a very courteous reply. The Jewish system of “casting,” he said, which had especially been criticized as barbarous, was a good deal misunderstood owing to the word by which it was described: in reality the animals were not “cast,” but “let down gently with ropes.” Mr. Forward, however, who had often witnessed the process, remained unconvinced on this point: it seemed to him that it was the public that was being let down gently with words.

The League had the satisfaction of seeing the Jewish system strongly condemned in the official report (1904)of the Committee appointed to consider the Humane Slaughtering of Animals; but nothing has yet been done to carry the recommendations of that Committee into effect, the supposed sanctity of a “religious” usage having been allowed, as usual, to outweigh the clearest dictates of humaneness.

There are not a few other current and strongly-rooted practices to which the title of this chapter might justly be applied; but enough has now been said to show that the merry month of May, in the year of grace 1640, did not witness, as has been supposed, quite the last instance of the infliction of Torture in this favoured land of the free.

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