The “mystics” were often a great joy to us; for example, Mr. J. W. Lloyd, author of an occult work called Dawn-Thought, expressed himself as follows: “When I go afield with my gun, and kill my little brother, the Rabbit, I do not therefore cease to love him, or deny my relationship, or do him any real wrong. I simply set him free to come one step nearer to me.” Here was Brer Fox again, only funnier. We suggested to Mr. Lloyd that “Brawn-Thought” might be a more appropriate title for his book.
Thus, like pedagogues, we faddists, too, had our diversions; cheered as we were in the weary work of propaganda by such mental harlequinades as those of which I have quoted a few specimens almost at random.
Perhaps the most laughable thing about the poor spavined Fallacies was the entire confidence with which they were trotted out. They were very old and very silly; they had again and again been refuted; yet they were always advanced in a manner which seemed to say: “Surely this is an argument you have never heard before? Surely you will give up your humanitarian sentiment now?” As the frequent oral exposure of such inveterate sophisms was a tedious task, we found it convenient to print them, tabulated and numbered, each with its proper refutation, under some such title as “Familiar Fallacies,” or, borrowing from Sydney Smith, “The Noodle’s Oration”; and then, when some opponent came along exultingly with one or other of them, all we had to do was to send him the list, with a mark against his own delusion. Trust one who has tried the plan: it is more effective than any amount of personal talk. The man who will bore you to death with his pertinacious twaddle, in the belief that he is saying something new, will soon tire of it when he finds the whole story already in print, with a “See number—” written large in blue pencil against his most original argument.
But the League did not stop at that point: we felt ourselves competent, after years of experience, to carry the war into the enemies’ camp—to hoist them with their own petard by means of the reductio ad absurdum, a pretended defence of the very practices which we were attacking. The publication of the first and only number of The Brutalitarian, a Journal for the Sane and Strong, went far towards achieving our aims. The printers were inundated with requests for copies, and the editor (as I happen to know) received many letters of warm congratulation on his efforts “to combat the sickly sentiments of modern times.” The press, as a whole, regarded the new paper with amusement tempered with caution: some suspecting in it the hand of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, some of Mr. Bernard Shaw, while one venturesome editor hinted that the humanitarians themselves might have been concerned in it, but prudently added that “perhaps that would be attributing too much cleverness to the Humanitarian League.” So the authorship of the Brutalitarian, like that of the letters of Junius, remained a secret; but the laughter caused by its preposterous eulogies of Flogging put a stop for the time to the cry that had been raised in Blackwood by Mr. G. W. Steevens and others, that “we have let Brutality die out too much.” They did not relish their own panacea, when it was served to them in an undiluted form, and with imbecility no less than brutality as its principal ingredient.
The Eton Beagles, of course, offered a tempting mark for satire, as it was easy to hit upon a strain of balderdash, in mock defence of hare-hunting, the absurdity of which would be apparent to the ordinary reader, yet would escape the limited intelligence of schoolboys and sporting papers. Accordingly, there appeared in 1907, two numbers of The Beagler Boy, conducted by two Old Etonians with the professed purpose of “saving a gallant school sport from extinction,” and with the ulterior design of showing that there is nothing too fatuous to be seriously accepted as argument by the upholders of blood-sports.
The success of the Beagler Boy in this adventure was not for a moment in doubt. The Etonians were enthusiastic over it. The Sportsman found it “a publication after our own heart,” and “far more interesting and invigorating than anything we are capable of”; and the hoax was welcomed in like manner by Sporting Life, Horse and Hound, and the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, a periodical described (by itself) as “bright, entertaining, and original.” One of the most solemnly comic notices was that in Countryside, Mr. E. Kay Robinson’s paper, which found the Beagler Boy “clever and strenuous, but of course ex parte”; but the gem of the collection was a long and serious dissertation on “Boys and Beagles” in the British Medical Journal, which thought that its readers would be glad to have their attention directed to the new sporting organ. There was a sauve qui peut among these worthy people when, from the general laughter in the press, they learnt that they had been imposed upon; but the shock was borne most good-humouredly. “Even the beagler boys,” as was remarked by the Evening Standard, “those of them, at least, who know how rare and precious an instrument satire is, may forgive, after they have read: perhaps some will even be converted.” Their disillusionment must certainly have been rather keenly felt at the time; like that of the lion who, as related in The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, had carried off what he thought was a coolie from the tent, only to find, when he had gone some distance, that it was a sack of sawdust.
The Beagler Boy was added, by request, to Lord Harcourt’s collection of books, pamphlets, and other matter relating to Eton, which at a later date he presented to the School. It must, I feel sure, be gratifying to Sir George Greenwood, and to the other Old Etonian who collaborated with him in the editorship, to know that the fruits of their toil are thus enshrined in the archives of Eton College.
Some twelve months after the meteoric career of the Beagler Boy it happened that there was a good deal of talk about an Eton Mission to China, which was to give the Chinese “an opportunity of the best education and of learning Christianity.” Then a very curious thing happened. A Chinese gentleman, Mr. Ching Ping, who was in England at the time, wrote to Dr. Lyttelton, the headmaster, and offered to conduct a Chinese Mission to Eton, in order to bring “a message of humanity and civilization to your young barbarians of the West.” The proposal was not accepted, and it was even hinted in the press that Mr. Ching Ping came from this side of Suez; but however that may have been, his letter to Dr. Lyttelton had a wide circulation, both in England and in the Far East.
Such were some of a faddist’s diversions; others too we had, of a different kind, for the every-day work that goes on behind the scenes in an office is by no means devoid of entertainment to one who is interested in the eccentricities of human nature, and is prepared to risk some wasted hours in studying them. There was a time when I went to the headquarters of the Humanitarian League in Chancery Lane almost daily for some years, and there had experience of many strange visitors and correspondents of every complexion—voluble cranks and genial impostors; swindlers begging for the cost of a railway-ticket to their distant and long-lamented homes; ex-convicts proposing to write their prison-story at the League’s expense; needy journalists anxious to pick up a paragraph; litigants who wanted gratuitous legal advice; and, worst of all, the confidential Bores who were determined to talk to one for hours together about what Mr. Stead used to call “the progress of the world.”
Nor did the post often fail to bring me some queer tidings—a letter perhaps, from some zealot who sent his latest pamphlet about “God’s Dumb Animals” (himself, alas! not one of them), with a request that it should be at once forwarded to the Pope; a voluminous work in manuscript, propounding, as its author assured me, “opinions of an extraordinary and undreamt of kind”; an anthology of Bible-texts in praise of some disputed practice; a suggestion that a notorious murderer should be flogged before being hanged; a grave remonstrance from a friend who feared that public abattoirs “would pave the way for Socialism”; a request from a very troublesome correspondent that the League would award a medal to a man who had saved her from drowning; two twenty-page epistles from an American lady, who, in the first, complimented me on my “markedly intelligent view of the universe,” and in the second told me frankly that I was a fool; a note inviting me to call at a certain address, to fetch a cat whom the writer wished me to destroy; and an urgent inquiry whether sea-sand was a healthy bedding for pigs. Such communications were the daily reward of those who sat in offices to promote humanitarian principles. It was remarkable how few persons volunteered for the work.