Seventy Years Among Savages

by Henry S. Salt

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 the area 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 joining an 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 entitled Swords 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 American friend to whom I had vainly commended Carpenter’s writings; for in his joy over Swords and Plowshares he rashly jumped to the conclusion that “Ernest Crosby” was a nom de plume for 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; but now a flood of light is illuminating his Towards 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. It was Darrow; 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 has become 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. His Farmington is a fascinating book of reminiscences, and An Eye for an Eye the 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 the Humanitarian, the Humane 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 the Freethinker, 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.