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 deserts he 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 when he was in London. He had an extraordinary aptitude for re-stating unpopular truths in a form palatable to the public; and his Every 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 his In 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 the Humane 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 the Humane Review and the Humanitarian.
The Humane 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 the Review included 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 the Humane Review in 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 goodwill of 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 there have 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.”