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 reared from 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 callousness with 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’s The Universal Kinship, published by the League in 1906. It was through a notice which I wrote in the Humanitarian of 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.
In The 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 and non-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.