XIIIHOOF-MARKS OF THE VANDAL

In a small chamber, friendless and unseen,Toiled o’er his types one poor unlearn’d young man;The place was dark, unfurnitured and mean;Yet there the freedom of a race began.

Thus it was that, with an ante-room of very diminutive size, we were almost at the mercy of any one who opened the outer door; for though the secretary of the League, Miss Whitaker, would rush forward most devotedly to bear the brunt of the charge, not a few of our assailants were through the front lines, and well in our midst, before we were aware of it. To this I owe my not inconsiderable knowledge of the time-devouring Bore.

Among the ex-prisoners who visited us were occasionally some very good fellows, with a real wish to do something to improve the penal system, which they all described as thoroughly bad; but as a rule they lacked the power of expressing what they knew, or were hampered by some personal ailment. There was one, a quiet civil man, who was anxious to give a lecture before the League, and assured us that, though he was prone to drink, he would take care that none of his lapses should coincide with the date of his appearance on our platform. That was a risk which we were not disposed to take; but strange to say, the very disaster which we shunned in this case actually befell us, a year or two afterwards, at a most respectable meeting which we organized jointly with another Society. On the very stroke of the clock, when the audience was all seated in expectation, and the chairman was ready to ascend the platform, supported by the members of our Committee, the news reached us that the lecturer himself could not be present: it washein fact, who was having to be “supported,” in another and more literal sense.

Ex-warders did not often favour us with a visit; but one there was who had been employed in Reading Gaol at the time when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned there: such was his story, and I had no reason to disbelieve it. He told me several edifying anecdotes, among them the following: It used to be a great hardship to Wilde that the glazed window of his cell allowedhim no skyward view (one recalls his allusion, inThe Ballad of Reading Gaol, to “that little tent of blue, which prisoners call the sky”); and once, when the prison chaplain was visiting him, he spoke sorrowfully of this grievance. But the chaplain only offered him spiritual comfort, and urged him to lift up his thoughts “to Him who is above the sky”; whereat Wilde, suddenly losing his patience, exclaimed, “Get out, you d——d fool!” and pushed him to the door. For this he was reported to the Governor.

The League had not often the honour of finding itself in agreement with the Prison Commissioners; but we did think that they were wise to decline the too generous offer of a body calling itself the Poetry Recital Society to read poetry to prisoners. The words, “I was in prison, and ye came unto me,” would receive a new and fearful significance, if a number of versifiers and reciters were to be let loose on the helpless inmates of our gaols. It seemed barbarous on the part of these minstrels to try to secure an audience which had no choice in the matter, and which had not got even an open window to jump through if the strain should have become too acute.

Of beggars and swindlers we had no lack in Chancery Lane; it suited their purpose to regard a Humanitarian League as primarily designed for the relief of the impecunious; its very name, they felt, could imply nothing less. They were mostly young men who seemed to act in concert; for they usually came, as if on circuit, at certain times of the year. Their mentality was of a low order (or they thought that ours was), for though they showed a certain ingenuity in collecting previous information about the parties on whom they tried to impose, they often presented their case so badly as to make it palpably absurd. Sometimes, however, a really clever and humorous rogue would make his appearance. There was one such who began a wordy statement that if I wouldbut grant him twenty minutes, he could convince me that he was deserving of half a crown; but when I hinted that if the interview was going to cost me half a crown, I would rather be spared the twenty minutes, his solemnity fell from him like a cloud, and with a twinkling eye he said that he would be only too pleased to cut his story as short as I liked.

When I was a master at Eton I used to subscribe to the Charity Organization Society, and I was presented by that austere body with a number of tickets, one of which was to be given to every beggar who called; but the trouble was that the tramps declined to regard the “scrap of paper” seriously, and informed us, in effect, that when they asked for bread we were offering them a stone. It certainly did not seem quite a human way of treating a fellow-being; unless one could hold the comfortable belief, confidently expressed to me by one of my Eton colleagues, a very religious man, that every mendicant one meets has had a good chance in life, and has deliberately thrown it away. The logic of that view was to say “no” to everybody.

I once had an opportunity of seeing the exactly opposite theory put into practice. When I was living in Surrey, I had a visit from Prince Kropotkin, who was looking for a house in the district, and we spent a day in walking about on that quest. We met a troop of beggars whose appearance was decidedly professional; and I noticed that Kropotkin at once responded to their appeal. Later in the day we fell in with the same party, and again, when they told their tale of woe, Kropotkin put his hand in his pocket. At this I ventured to ask him whether he had observed that they were the same lot; to which he replied: “Oh, yes. I know they are probably impostors and will drink the money at the public house; butweare going back to our comfortable tea, and I cannot run the risk of refusing help where it may possibly be needed.” If in this matter one sympathizes withKropotkin rather than with the Charity Organization folk, I suppose it is on Shelley’s principle—that he would “rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than be saved with Paley and Malthus.”

I will conclude this chapter on our diversions with a rather diverting passage from Mr. George Moore’sConfessions:

“Self, and after self, a friend; the rest may go to the devil; and be sure that when any man is more stupidly vain and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his hideousness in humanitarianism.... Humanitarianism is a pigsty where liars, hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate; it has been so since the great Jew conceived it, and it will be so till the end. Far better the blithe modern pagan in his white tie and evening clothes, and his facile philosophy. He says: ‘I don’t care how the poor live; my only regret is that they live at all’; and he gives the beggar a shilling.”

Many years ago, at a meeting of the Shelley Society, I had the pleasure of a talk with Mr. George Moore; and I remember that when he asked me what work I was doing, and I said it was mostly humanitarian, there came over his expressive face a look of half-incredulous surprise and disgust—the sort of look a bishop might give to one who coolly remarked that he had just committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. I was rather puzzled at the moment; and it was not till long after, when I read Mr. Moore’sConfessions, that I realized of what crimes I had convicted myself in his eyes by my too careless avowal. But as for “the blithe modern pagan,” I suspect he would be a little less blithe if his wish were fulfilled, and the poor did not live at all; for how then would he obtain his evening clothes and his white tie? He would have to live entirely, one fears, upon his “facile philosophy,” as snails were once reputed to subsist on their own succulence.

The barbarian gives to the earth he lives on an aspect of rough brutality.—Elisée Reclus.

HUMANITARIANISMis not merely an expression of sympathy with pain: it is a protest against all tyranny and desecration, whether such wrong be done by the infliction of suffering on sentient beings, or by the Vandalism which can ruthlessly destroy the natural grace of the earth. It is in man’s dealings with the mountains, where, owing to the untameable wildness of the scenery, any injury is certain to be irreparable, that the marks of the modern Vandal are most clearly seen.

It so happens that as I have known the mountains of Carnarvonshire and Cumberland rather intimately for many years, the process of spoliation which, as Elisée Reclus has remarked, is a characteristic of barbarism, has been there forced on my attention. It is close on half a century since I was introduced to some of the wildest mountains of North Wales by that muscular bishop, Dr. G. A. Selwyn, of whom I have spoken in an earlier chapter, when, as tutor to his nephew, I was one of an episcopal party that went on a summer holiday from Lichfield to Penmaenmawr. There the bishop relaxed very genially from the austere dignities of his Palace: and having procured an Ordnance map, was not only taken with a desire to find his way across the heights to Llyn-an-Afon, a tarn which nestles under the front of the great rangeof Carnedd Llewelyn, but insisted on being accompanied by his nephew and his nephew’s tutor. Mountaineering, as I afterwards saw, could not have been one of Dr. Selwyn’s many accomplishments; for we had to make more than one expedition before we set eyes on the lake, and in the course of our first walk he slipped on a steep ridge and put his thumb out of joint, to the secret amusement, I had reason to fear, of my pupil, who, greatly disliking these forced marches into the wilderness, regarded the accident as a nemesis on an uncle’s despotism. But to me the experience of those bleak uplands was invaluable, for it was the beginning of a love of mountains, both Cambrian and Cumbrian, which led me to return to them again and again, until I had paid over a hundred visits to their chief summits. Thus I could not fail to note, now in the one district, now in the other, how the hand of the desecrator had been busy.

Recent discussions in the press on the subject of the proposed Sty Head motor-road have been useful in two ways: first, they called forth so strong and general an expression of opinion against that ill-advised project, as to render its realization extremely unlikely for a long time to come; and secondly, they drew attention to the wider and deeper under-lying question of the preservation of British mountain scenery against Vandalism of various kinds. The attempt on the Sty Head was in itself a significant object-lesson in the dangers by which our mountain “sanctuaries” are beset. A hundred and fifty years ago the poet Gray could write thus of the hamlet of Seathwaite, where the famous Pass has its entrance on the Borrowdale side:

“All further access is here barred to prying mortals, only there is a little path winding over the fells, and for some weeks in the year passable to the dalesmen; but the mountains know well that these innocent people will not reveal the mysteries of their ancient kingdom.”

If the mountains held that belief, it wasthey, not the dalesmen, who were the innocents, for the little path has been found passable at every season of the year; and Mr. G. D. Abraham, himself a distinguished climber, and a native of the district, was so willing to reveal the mountain mysteries as to plead in his book onMotor Ways in Lakelandfor the construction of a highroad from the very point where all farther access used to be barred. “The quaint little old-world hamlet,” he said, “will doubtless recover its glory of former days when the highway over Sty Head Pass becomes an accomplished fact.”

The love of mountains, itself a growth of modern times, has in fact brought with it a peril which did not exist before; it has opened the gateway and pointed the path to the shrine; but where the worshipper enters, what if the destroyer enters too? What if the pilgrim is close followed by the prospector?

Some years ago Mr. C. P. Trevelyan, M.P., introduced an “Access to Mountains Bill,” which while safeguarding the interests of land-owners, would have permitted pedestrians to indulge their love of highland scenery by making their way to the summits of uncultivated mountain or moorland. All nature-lovers must desire that such a measure may become law; and it might be hoped that landlords themselves would not persist in opposing it, for consideration should show them that it is impossible permanently to exclude the people from the hilltops of their native land. Even now, since it is the difficult and the forbidden which attract, there is a certain relish in the attempted ascent of those heights which in the landlord’s sense (not the climber’s) are still “inaccessible”—just as the cragsmen find a pleasure in striving to surmount the obstacles of rock-face or gully. Who has not longed to cross the lofty frontier into some deer-stalking or grouse-shooting Thibet, where, beyond the familiar lyingsign-post stating that “trespassers will be prosecuted,” all is vagueness and mystery? What mountain-lover has not at times sought to snatch an “access to mountains” where access was denied?

I still recall the zest of a raid, albeit unsuccessful, on one of the summits of the Grampians, when our small party of climbers, starting from Aviemore, and passing the heathery shores of Loch-an-Eilan, fell in near “the Argyle Stone” with a number of deer-stalkers, who groaned aloud in their fury when they heard by what route we had ascended, and insisted on our going down to Kincraig. We had spoiled their day’s sport, they told us; and we, while regretting to have done so, could not refrain from saying that they had equally spoiled ours. We were consoled, however, in some measure, during that inglorious descent, by the sight of an osprey, or fishing-eagle, hovering over the river Spey: doubtless the bird was one of a pair that for years haunted Loch-an-Eilan, until the cursed cupidity of egg-collectors drove them from almost their last breeding-place.

One of the most inaccessible heights in England at the present day is Kinderscout, the “Peak” of Derbyshire, a triangular plateau of heathery moorland, with rocky “edges” broken into fantastic turrets and “castles.” Here only do the Derbyshire hills show some true mountain characteristics; and the central position of the “Peak,” which is about twenty miles equidistant from Sheffield, Manchester, and Huddersfield, would seem to mark it as a unique playground for the dwellers in our great manufacturing towns. In reality, it is aterra incognitato all but a very few, a place not for workers to find health in, but for sportsmen to shoot grouse; and there is no spot in England which is guarded against intruders with more jealous care. I speak advisedly, for I once tried, with some friends, to “rush” the summit-ridge from the public path which crosses its western shoulders, only to beovertaken and turned back by some skilfully posted gamekeeper.[36]The loss to the public of a right of way over these moors, as over many similar places, is deplorable; and here, as elsewhere, the compromise that has been arrived at has been greatly to the landlord’s advantage, for while the grouse-shooter excludes the public from a vast area of moorland, the wayfarer finds himself limited to the narrowest of roundabout routes, and is insulted, as at Ashop Head, by a perfect plague of notice-boards threatening all the imaginary pains and penalties of the law for any divergence on to the hillside. Certainly an Access to Mountains Bill is urgently required.

But there is one thing which is even worse than too little access to mountains, and that is the concession of too much. It were heartily to be wished that such districts as those of the Lakes, Snowdonia, and others which might be named, had long ago been made inaccessible, in this sense, to the railway-lord, the company-promoter, and all the other Vandals who for commercial purposes would destroy the sanctitude of the hills. We have, in fact, to consider whatsortof access we propose, for just as there is all the difference in the world between the admission of the public to see a grand piece of statuary, and the admission of the man who has a design to chip the statue’s nose, so we have to distinguish between those who come to the mountains to speculate on the beauties of Nature and those who come there to speculate in a baser sense. Access to mountains is in itself most desirable, but what if we end by having no mountains to approach? In this respect the Bill might be strengthened, by making it withhold from theVandal the access which it would bestow on the mountaineer.

Already much that was of inestimable value has been lost. The Lake District has in this respect been more fortunate than some other localities, because, owing to the powerful sentiment aroused by the Lake poets, there is a considerable public opinion opposed to any act of desecration. For this we have to thank, in the first place, the great name of Wordsworth, and, next, the faithful band of defenders which has stood between the enterprising contractor and his prey, as in the case of the once threatened railway to Ambleside and Grasmere. But even in Lakeland no little damage has been done, as by the mining which has ruined the scenery of Coniston, and by the permission granted to Manchester to turn the once sylvan and secluded Thirlmere into a suburban tank—Thirlmere first, and now the ruin of Haweswater is to follow.

Mention has been made in an earlier part of this book of a visit which I paid to Coniston in the winter of 1878-79. It so happened that a spell of severe frost and cloudless skies had then turned the Lakeland mountains into a strange realm of enchantment, the rocks being fantastically coated with fronds and feathers of snow, and the streams and waterfalls frozen into glittering masses of ice. I was the only visitor in the place (it was before Mr. Harrison Riley’s arrival), and for several days I had been scrambling over the range of the Old Man mountain without meeting a human being, when one afternoon, on the shore of Levers Water, a solitary figure came suddenly round a buttress of the hill and stalked silently past me as if wrapped in thought. I knew at once that it was Ruskin, for what other inhabitant of Coniston would be on the fells at such a season?

A few days later, when I went to Brantwood with Harrison Riley, as I have described, Ruskin talkeda good deal of his favourite mountain haunts, as he showed us his wild strawberry beds, and terraces on the hillside made like Swiss roads; also a small beck running through his grounds to the lake, which he said was never dry, and was as precious to him as a stream of pure gold. The Lake scenery, he said, almost compensated him for the loss of Switzerland, which he could not hope to see again; his feeling for it was one less of affection than of “veneration.” But the sunsets had been a disappointment to him, for the sky above the Old Man was often sullen and overclouded, and this he attributed to the poisonous influence of the copper mines.

At present the chief danger to the quietude and beauty of the Lake district seems to be the motor-craze, especially that form of it which has been called “the fascinating sport of hill-hunting,” a game which has turned the Kirkstone Pass into a place of terror, where noisy machines pant and snort up one side and scorch furiously down the other, and which is now craving new heights to conquer. If not on the Sty Head, why not make a motor-way of the old track from Langdale to Eskdale over the passes of Wrynose and Hardknott? Such was the “compromise” which some mountain-lovers unwisely suggested, forgetting, first, that even this surrender, though less deadly than that of the Sty Head, would involve the destruction of a wild and primitive tract, and secondly that, as there is no finality in such dealings, it would only whet the motorists’ appetite for more. It is generally overlooked, too, though the point is a very important one, that the invaders have already got much more than their due share of the district; for the making of many of the roads now in existence would have been strongly opposed years ago, if it had been possible to foresee the riotous use to which they would be put.

But it is when we turn to the mountains of Snowdonia that we see what inexcusable injury has been doneby the rapacity of private enterprise, connived at by the indifference of the public. It is a somewhat strange fact that, while there is an English branch of the League for the Preservation of Swiss Scenery, no organized attempt is made to preserve our own mountain scenery, not from desecration merely, but from destruction.[37]

Take, for example, the case of the River Glaslyn, which flows from the heart of Snowdon through Cwm Dyli and Nant Gwynant, till it finds its way by the Pass of Aberglaslyn to the sea. Visitors are often invited to admire the “power works,” erected some years ago at the head of Nant Gwynant, and other signs of enterprise; but from the nature-lover’s point of view there is a different tale to tell. The once shapely peak of Snowdon has been blunted into a formless cone by the Summit Hotel, which has since added to its premises a battlemented wall built of red brick; both Glaslyn and Llyn Llydaw, two tarns of flawless natural beauty, have long been befouled with copper mines; and more recently the glorious waterfall, through which the stream dashed headlong from Cwm Dyli to Nant Gwynant, has been replaced by a line of hideous metal pipes, by which the whole hillside is scarred. As for the far-famed Pass of Aberglaslyn, defaced as it is by railway works and tunnellings, remorselessly begun and then temporarily abandoned, its state can only be described as one of stagnant devastation.

Yet all this mountain scenery, which has been foolishly sacrificed for private purposes, might have been a public possession of inestimable value had it been tended as it deserved; and much yet remains in Snowdonia that might be saved for the enjoyment and refreshment of future generations, if the apathy of public feeling, and of the Welsh people, could bedispelled. But it is useless to look for local resistance to this vandalism, for one is always met by the assertion, true but irrelevant, that such enterprises “give work”; which, indeed, would equally justify the pulling down of Westminster Abbey to “give work” to the unemployed of London. Nothing but an enlightened public opinion, unmistakably expressed, can now avert the destruction (for such it is) of the noblest of Welsh, perhaps of all British mountains.

It is strange that the incongruity—the lack of humour—in these outrages on the sanctitude of a great mountain does not make itself felt. What could be more ridiculous, apart from the gross vandalism of the act, than to put a railway-station on Snowdon? A friend who knows the Welsh mountains intimately told me that on his first visit to the peak, after the building of the Summit Hotel, he remarked to a companion: “We shall be expected to have a green chartreuse after lunch here.” A waiter, overhearing him, said: “We ain’t got no green chartreuse, sir; but we have cherry brandy and curaçoa, if you like.”

In a little book entitledOn Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills, published in 1908, I commented strongly on these outrages, and the justice of my criticisms with regard to the ruin of Welsh mountain scenery was not seriously disputed in the local press, though one editor did accuse me of being guilty of “a wicked libel upon the people of Wales,” and expressed himself as having been caused “real pain” by my remarks. When, however, I asked him to consider what real pain the disfigurement of Snowdon had caused to mountain-lovers, and suggested that, instead of taking me to task, he should try to arouse his readers to put an end to the vandalism which, for the sake of a temporary profit, is ruining some of the finest portions of Carnarvonshire, he made a reply which was, in fact, a most signal corroboration of my complaint; for he stated that I had evidently “no conception ofthe difficulties which residents in North Wales have to encounter when they oppose any commercial enterprise, backed up by English speculators, which threatens to spoil our beauty-spots.”[38]There we have the fatal truth in a sentence! What is spoiling Snowdonia is the commercial cupidity of the Welsh themselves, utilized by English capitalists. The editor naïvely added that, were I myself living in North Wales, I should be “more sympathetic.” More sympathetic, that is, with the Welsh residents, who know that their country is being spoiled, but dare not say so; less sympathetic with the mountain-lovers who deplore this crime!

In the excuses put forward for the invasion of the mountains with funicular railways, motor high-roads, and the like, there is a comic element which would be vastly entertaining if the very existence of mountain scenery were not at stake. Thus I have been met with the argument that a mountain railway, such as that on Snowdon, “takes into a purer atmosphere and into an ennobling environment those who have no other way of learning the lesson that grand mountains can teach,” to wit, “the enfeebled toilers of the towns.” I was reminded, as one convicted of “a little selfishness,” that “the weak and the feeble have to be considered, as well as the athletic and the hardy.” But, in the first place, those who travel by so expensive a route as this mountain railway are rarely the toilers of the towns, nor, so far as I have observed them, are they “the weak and the feeble.” They seem to be mostly able-bodied well-to-do tourists, who are too lazy to use their legs. I once overheard a passenger in a train, describing a recent Swiss trip, make the remark: “Oh, no, I didn’twalka step. Funicular railways up nearly all the mountains—Pilatus, Rigi, and the rest. I wouldn’t give a fig towalk.”

It is amusing, too, to find “imperial” reasonsadvanced in defence of the Snowdon railroad, in what is called the “Official Guide,” a pamphlet published by the London and North-Western Railway at Llanberis England, we are proudly told, “does not usually care to be behind other countries in matters of progress, but, with regard to the application of mechanical means for reaching the peaks of mountains, until now it has certainly been so.” The inference is obvious. Patriotic climbers should ascend Snowdon by train.

Then there is the clever appeal to the sense of peril and romance. We are informed in the same disinterested treatise that the owner of Snowdon (yes, reader, Snowdon isowned!), “having regard to the exigencies of the modern tourist, the increasing eagerness of people to ‘do’ Snowdon, and the dangers which beset the ordinary ways available for that purpose, felt that the solitude and sanctity of Snowdon ought, to a certain extent, to give way before the progressive advance of the age.” And again: “Hitherto none but the most daring or the most sanguine would venture to ascend during a storm.... None the less, however, Snowdon during a storm presents a scene of impressive grandeur, and the new railway will make it possible to see it under this aspect without risk.” Henceforth poets will know how to view the grandeur of the gathering storm. “I climbed the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn,” sang Scott. The modern singer will take a ticket on the Snowdon Mountain Tramroad.

The true objection to mountain railways is not that they bring more people to the mountain, but that they spoil the very thing that the people come to see, viz. the mountain itself. The environment, in fact, is no longer “ennobling” when a mountain-top is vulgarized, as Snowdon has been, by a railway and hotel; it is then not a mountain scene at all. There are numberless points of view in North Wales, and in every highland district, to which the weak and feeble can be easily conveyed, and from whichthey can see the mountains at their best; but to construct a railway to the chief summit is “to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs,” because, when that is done, there is no mountain (in the true sense) any longer for the enjoyment of either feeble or strong.

And surely the feeble can seek their enjoyment in fitter ways than in being hauled up mountains by steam. I have heard of a blind man who walked, with a friend to guide him, to the top of Goatfell, in the Isle of Arran, because he wished to feel the mountain air and to hear the thunder of the sea waves far away below. Was not that better than spoiling Goatfell with a rail? Not, of course, that such railways are really made for the benefit of the feeble-bodied; they are built for commercial purposes, to put money into private pockets at the expense of scenery which should belong to the community as a whole.

But it is not only the nature-lover and the rock-climber who are interested in the preservation of mountains; the naturalist also, and the botanist, are very deeply concerned, for the extermination of the rarer fauna and flora is practically assured unless the onroad of this vandalism is checked. The golden eagle, the kite, and the osprey are gone. Do we desire such birds as the raven, the chough, the buzzard, and the peregrine falcon to survive in their few remaining strongholds? If so, we must take measures to stop the depredations not only of the egg-collecting tourist, but of the death-dealing gamekeeper.

The flight of the buzzard is one of the greatest glories of the hills of Cumberland and Carnarvonshire, and it is deeply to be regretted that so beautiful and harmless a bird should be wantonly destroyed. The worst—or should we say the best?—that can be said of the buzzard is that in very rare instances he has been known to “stoop” at persons who approach his eyrie. In a letter which appeared in theLakes Chroniclesome years ago a tourist absurdly complained that he hadbeen attacked on a mountain near Windermere by a “huge bird “—evidently a buzzard—and urged that “it would be to the advantage of the public if some good shot were to free the mountain of this foul-fiend usurper.” The buzzard defending his nest is a “foul-fiend usurper”! Such is the amount of sympathy which the average tourist has with the wild mountain bird! And as for the ornithological knowledge, this may be judged from the fact that a similar incident on the same mountain was actually described in the papers under the head, “Bustardattacks a clergyman.”

Of the wild upland flora there is the same tale to tell. The craze for collecting, and what is worse, uprooting, the rarer Alpine plants has almost brought about the extinction of several species, such as thesaxifraga nivalis, which used to be fairly frequent on Snowdon, Helvellyn, and other British hills; and this in spite of the many appeals that have been made to the better feeling of tourists. Public spirit in these matters seems to be wellnigh dead.

What, then, is being done, in the face of these destructive agencies, to preserve our wild mountain districts, and the wild life that is native to them, from the ruin with which they are threatened? As far as I am aware, apart from occasional protests in newspapers, this only—that appeals are made to the public from time to time by the National Trust and kindred societies to save, by private purchase, certain “beauty spots” from spoliation. These appeals cannot but meet with the entire approval of nature-lovers, and the rescuing of such estates as Catbells, Gowbarrow, Grange Fell, and others that might be mentioned, represents a real measure of success. Still the question has to be faced—what is to be done in the future if, as is certain to happen, the menace to our mountains is maintained? It is too much to hope that large sums can always be raised by private subscription; also, while one favoured place is being safeguarded,others, less fortunate, are being destroyed. We cannot save our mountains generally by these piecemeal purchases; for even if the money were always procurable, the rate of destruction exceeds that of purchase, and the power of the many syndicates that would exploit the mountains must necessarily be greater than that of the few Societies that would preserve them. In a word, private action is quite inadequate, in the long run, to repel so extensive an attack.

What is needed is public action on a scale commensurate with the evil, in the direction of the “reservation” of certain districts as sanctuaries for all wild life. We need, in fact, highland parks, in which the hills themselves, with the wild animals and plants whose life is of the hills, shall be preserved in their wildness as the property of the people; an arrangement which would be equally gratifying to the nature-lover, the naturalist, and the mountaineer, and of vastly more “profit” to the nation as a whole than the disfigurement of its beautiful places.

Without at all suggesting that the National Trust should relax its efforts for the rescue by purchase of particular tracts, I think that it would be doing a still greater service if it could see its way to organizing a movement for pressing on the Government the urgent need of taking some active steps to counteract the injury which is being done by commercial interests to the true interests of the people. Otherwise the result will be that while a few spots are saved, whole districts will be lost, and eventually all that the nation will possess will be some oases of beauty in a desert of ugliness.

As I have elsewhere pointed out,[39]there is only one thorough solution of the problem, and that is, to nationalize such districts as Snowdonia, Lakeland, the Peak of Derbyshire, and other public holiday-haunts, and so to preserve them for the use and enjoymentof the people for all time. “If parks, open spaces, railways, tramways, water, and other public needs can be nationalized, why not mountains? It is impossible to over-estimate the value of mountains as a recreation-ground for soul and body; yet, while we are awaking to the need of maintaining public rights in other directions, we are allowing our mountains—in North Wales and elsewhere—to be sacrificed to commercial selfishness. If Snowdon, for instance, had been purchased by the public twenty years ago, the investment would have been a great deal more profitable than those in which we usually engage; but while we are willing to spend vast sums on grabbing other people’s territory, we have not, of course, a penny to spare for the preservation of our own.”

At least we witness of thee, ere we die,That these things are not otherwise, but thus.Swinburne.

TWENTY-FOURyears’ work with the Humanitarian League had left many problems unsolved, many practical matters undecided; but on one point some of us were now in no sort of uncertainty—that a race which still clung tenaciously to the practices at which I have glanced in the foregoing chapters was essentially barbaric, not in its diet only, though the butchery of animals for food had first arrested our attention, but also, and not less glaringly, in its penal system, its sports, its fashions, and its general way of regarding that great body of our fellow-beings whom we call “the animals.” It did not need Mr. Howard Moore’s very suggestive book,Savage Survivals,[40]to convince us of this; but we found in the conclusions reached by him an ample corroboration of those we had long had in mind, and which alone could explain the stubborn adherence of educated as well as uneducated classes to a number of primitive and quite uncivilized habits. “It is not possible,” he says, “to understand the things higher men do, nor to account for the things that you find in their natures, unless you recognize the fact that higher men are merely savages made over and only partially changed.”

Professor F. W. Newman’s warning, that the time was not ripe for a Humanitarian League, had to this extent been verified: if we had thought that we were going to effect any great visible changes, we should have been justly disappointed. But those who work with no expectation of seeing results cannot be disappointed; they are beyond the scope of failure, and may even meet, as we did, with some small and unforeseen success. The League was thus, in the true sense of the term, a Forlorn Hope; that is, a troop of venturesome pioneers, who were quite untrammelled by “prospects,” and whose whim it was to open out a path by which others might eventually follow.

Perhaps the success of the League lay less in what it did than in what itdemanded—less, that is, in the defeat of a flogging Bill, or in the abolition of a cruel sport, than in the fearless, logical, and unwavering assertion of a clear principle of humaneness, which applies to the case of human and non-human alike. After all, it does not so greatly matter whether this or that particular form of cruelty is prohibited; what matters is thatallforms of cruelty should be shown to be incompatible with progress. Here, I venture to think, the intellectual and controversial side of the League’s work was of some value; for before a new system could be built up, the ground had to be cleared, and the main obstacle to humanitarianism had long been the very widespread contempt for what is known as “sentiment,” and the idea that humanitarians were a poor weakly folk who might be ridiculed with impunity. The Humanitarian League changed all that; and a good many pompous persons, who had come into collision with its principles, emerged with modified views and a considerably enlarged experience.

I have already spoken of some of the protagonists of the League: at this point it may be fitting to recount, in epic fashion, the names and services of afew of the influential allies who from time to time lent us their aid.

Mr. Herbert Spencer’s philosophical writings were fully imbued with the humane spirit. An opponent of militarism, of vindictive penal laws, of corporal punishment for the young, of cruel sports, and indeed of every form of brutality, he had done as much as any man of his generation to humanize public opinion. He willingly signed the Humanitarian League’s memorials against the Royal Buckhounds and the Eton Beagles.

Dr. Alfred R. Wallace was also in full accord with us, and he was especially interested in our protest against the Game Laws, “those abominable engines of oppression and selfishness,” as he described them in one of several letters which I received from him. He was anxious that some Member of Parliament should be found who would move an annual resolution for the abolition of these laws, and he considered that such a motion “would serve as a very good test of Liberalism and Radicalism.” In reference to flogging under the old Vagrancy Act, he wrote: “There are scores or hundreds of these old laws which are a disgrace to civilization. Many years ago I advocated enacting a law for the automatic termination ofalllaws after, say, fifty years, on the ground that one generation cannot properly legislate for a later one under totally different conditions.”

“The Truth about the Game Laws,” a pamphlet of which Dr. Wallace expressed much approval, was written by Mr. J. Connell, author of “The Red Flag,” whose democratic instincts had led him to acquire first-hand knowledge of the nocturnal habits of game-keepers, and was prefaced with some spirited remarks by Mr. Robert Buchanan, who, as having been for many years a devotee of sport, here occupied, as he himself expressed it, “the position of the converted clown who denounces topsy-turvydom.” Buchanan’s humane sympathies were shown in many of his poems, as in his “Song of the Fur Seal,” inspired by one of the League’s pamphlets; he wrote also a powerful article on “The Law of Infanticide,” in reference to one of those cruel cases in which the death-sentence is passed on some poor distracted girl, and which clearly demonstrate, as Buchanan pointed out, that “we are still a savage and uncivilized people, able and willing to mow down with artillery such subject races as are not of our way of thinking, but utterly blind and indifferent to the sorrows of the weak and the sufferings of the martyred poor.”

George Meredith, for the last ten or twelve years of his life, was a friend and supporter of the League. “On a point or two of your advocacy,” he wrote to me, “I am not in accord with you, but fully upon most.” He declared the steel trap to be “among the most villainous offences against humanity”; and he more than once signed the League’s memorials against such spurious sports as rabbit-coursing and stag-hunting. When the Royal Buckhounds were abolished in 1891, he wrote to us: “Your efforts have gained their reward, and it will encourage you to pursue them in all fields where the good cause of sport, or any good cause, has to be cleansed of blood and cruelty. So you make steps in our civilization.”

Mr. Thomas Hardy more than once lent his name to the League’s petitions, and recognized that in its handling of the problem of animals’ rights it was grappling with the question “of equal justice all round.” In an extremely interesting letter, read at the annual meeting in 1910, he expressed his opinion that “few people seem to perceive fully, as yet, that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called the Golden Rule from thearea of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom.” This was, of course, the main contention of the Humanitarian League.

In 1896 the League addressed an appeal to a number of leading artists, asking them to make it plain that their sympathies were on the humanitarian side, and that they would at least not be abettors of that spirit of cruelty which is the ally and companion of ugliness. Very few replies were received, but among them was one from Mr. G. F. Watts, who, in becoming a member, wrote us a letter on the cruelty of docking horses’ tails (“barbarous in those who practise it, infinitely degrading in those who encourage it from so mean a motive as fashion—only not contemptible because so much worse”), which was very widely published in the press, and did great service in bringing an odious fashion into disrepute. Mr. Walter Crane was another artist who gave support on many occasions to humanitarian principles; so, too, was Mr. Martin Anderson (“Cynicus”), who employed on the League’s behalf his great powers as a satirist in a cartoon which castigated the tame deer hunt.

Count Tolstoy, it goes without saying, was in full sympathy with us; and so was that many-sided man of genius, M. Elisée Reclus. Famed as geographer, philosopher, and revolutionist, one is tempted to sum him up in the word “poet”; for though he did not write in verse, he was a great master of language, unsurpassed in lucidity of thought and serene beauty of style. He was a vegetarian, and the grounds of his faith are set forth in a luminous essay on that subject which he wrote for the Humanitarian League. Very beautiful, too, is his article on “The Great Kinship,” worthily translated by Edward Carpenter, in which he portrayed the primeval friendly relations of mankind with the lower races, and glanced at the still more wonderful possibilities of the future. His anarchist views prevented him from formally joiningan association which aimed at legislative action; but his help was always freely given. “I send you my small subscription,” he wrote, “without any engagement for the future, not knowing beforehand if next year I will be penniless or not.” I only once saw Elisée Reclus; it was on the occasion of an anarchist meeting in which he took part, and he then impressed me as being the Grand Old Man without rival or peer; never elsewhere have I seen such magnificent energy and enthusiasm combined with such lofty intellectual gifts.

Ernest Crosby, another philosophic anarchist, was perhaps as little known, in proportion to his great merits, as any writer of our time. Elected as a Republican to the Assembly of New York State, he had been appointed in 1889 to be a Judge of the International Court in Egypt; but after serving there five years, his whole life was suddenly changed, owing largely to a book of Tolstoy’s which fell into his hands: he resigned his post, and thenceforward passed judgment on no man but himself. A poet and thinker of high order, he stood up with unfailing courage against the brute force of “imperialism” in its every form—the exploitation of one race by another race, of one class by another class, of the lower animals by mankind. It is strange that his writings, especially the volume entitledSwords and Plowshares, should be almost unknown to English democrats, for they include many poems which touch a very high standard of artistic excellence, and a few that are gems of verse. “The Tyrant’s Song,” for instance, expresses in a few lines the strength of the Non-Resistant, and of the conscientious objector to military service (“the man with folded arms”); yet during all the long controversy on that subject I never once saw it quoted or mentioned. A superficial likeness between Crosby’s unrhymed poetry and that of Edward Carpenter led in one case to an odd error on the part of an Americanfriend to whom I had vainly commended Carpenter’s writings; for in his joy overSwords and Plowshareshe rashly jumped to the conclusion that “Ernest Crosby” was anom de plumefor the other E.C. “I owe you a confession,” he wrote. “Hitherto I have not been able to find in Carpenter anything that substantiated your admiration for him; butnowa flood of light is illuminating hisTowards Democracy.” I communicated this discovery to the poets concerned, and they were both charmed by it.

Crosby was a tall handsome man, of almost military appearance, and this, too, was a cause of misapprehension; for an English friend whom he visited, and who knew him only through his writings, spent a long afternoon with him without even discovering that he was the Crosby whose poems he admired.

Clarence Darrow, brother-in-law of Howard Moore and friend of Crosby, 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. ItwasDarrow; 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 hasbecome 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. HisFarmingtonis a fascinating book of reminiscences, andAn Eye for an Eyethe 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 theHumanitarian, theHumane 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 theFreethinker, 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 desertshe 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 whenhe was in London. He had an extraordinary aptitude for re-stating unpopular truths in a form palatable to the public; and hisEvery 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 hisIn 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 theHumane 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 theHumane Reviewand theHumanitarian.

TheHumane 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 theReviewincluded 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 theHumane Reviewin 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 goodwillof 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 therehave 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 meetsthe 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:

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