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islands, and still resort annually to its shores, persistently endeavouring to re-establish their colonies. A less amount of labour and expense would serve to introduce a few foreign species each year, and the reward would be greater, and would not make us ashamed. We have generously given our own wild animals to other countries; and from time to time we receive cheering reports of an abundant increase in at least two of our exportations--to wit, the rabbit and the sparrow. We are surely entitled to some return. Dead animals, however rich their pelt or bright their plumage may be, are not a fair equivalent. Dead things are too much with us. London has become a mart for this kind of merchandise for the whole of Europe, and the traffic is not without a reflex effect on us; for life in the inferior animals has come or is coming to be merely a thing to be lightly taken by human hands, in order that its dropped garment may be sold for filthy lucre. There are warehouses in this city where it is possible for a person to walk ankle-deep--literally to wade--in bright-plumaged bird-skins, and see them piled shoulder-high on either side of him--a sight to make the angels weep I
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Not the angel called woman. It is not that she is naturally more cruel than man; bleeding wounds and suffering in all its forms, even the sigh of a burdened heart, appeal to her quick sympathies, and draw the ready tears; but her imagination helps her less. The appeal must in most cases be direct and through the medium of her senses, else it is not seen and not heard. If she loves the ornament of a gay-winged bird, and is able to wear it with a light heart, it is because it calls up no mournful image to her mind; no little tragedy enacted in some far-off wilderness, of the swift child of the air fallen and bleeding out its bright life, and its callow nestlings, orphaned of the breast that warmed them, dying of hunger in the tree. We know, at all events, that out of a female population of many millions in this country, so far only ten women, possibly fifteen, have been found to raise their voices--raised so often and so loudly on other questions--to protest against the barbarous and abhorrent fashion of wearing slain birds as ornaments. The degrading business of supplying the demand for this kind of feminine adornment must doubtless continue to flourish in our midst, commerce not
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being compatible with morality, but the material comes from other lands, unblessed as yet with Wild Bird Protection Acts, and "individual efforts, and thousands of centres of personal influence"; it comes mainly from the tropics, where men have brutish minds and birds a brilliant plumage. This trade, therefore, does not greatly affect the question of our native bird life, and the consideration of the means, which may be within our reach, of making it more to us than it now is. Some species from warm and even hot climates have been found to thrive well in England, breeding in the open air; as, for instance, the black and the black-necked swans, the Egyptian goose, the mandarin and summer ducks, and others too numerous to mention. But these birds are semi-domestic, and are usually kept in enclosures, and that they can stand the climate and propagate when thus protected from competition is not strange; for we know that several of our hardy domestic birds--the fowl, pea-fowl, Guinea-fowl, and Muscovy duck--are tropical in their origin. Furthermore, they are all comparatively large, and if they ever become feral in England, it will not be for many years to come.
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