Humanitarian League

The Humanitarian League was a small radical British pressure group opposed all avoidable suffering on any sentient being.

The League was established by the socialist Henry Salt. Salt admired Howard Williams’ The Ethics of Diet (1883), a biographical history of the literature of humane dietetics, in which the formation of a ‘humane society with a wider scope than any previously existing body’ was proposed. Salt developed his ideas in an article, ‘Humanitarianism’, published in the Westminster Review in 1889.1

In 1891, Edward Maitland, Howard Williams, Kenneth Romanes and Henry Salt met with Alice Lewis at her house, 14 Park Square, London.2 Annie Besant, W. H. Hudson, Sydney Olivier, Bernard Shaw and Edward Carpenter were among those who promised their support. A manifesto was drawn up for the society.

Its campaigns were designed to change attitudes towards crime and punishment; the conditions of labour; the killing of animals for food, fashion, sport or profit; and the use of natural resources. Its ‘battles’ in the Lords and House of Commons are recorded in the League’s journal.

The League were influenced by one person above all others, Henry Salt. Salt was Secretary of the Humanitarian League and the Editor of the League’s two journals from 1895 to 1919, and he was appointed to special departments to deal with cruel sports, criminal law and prison reform, humane diet, education of children and opposition to war.

League Committees were strengthened by the inclusion of experienced workers. The most significant to join was Mr. Ernest Bell, a member of the well-known publishing firm, who for over twenty years was a bulwark of strength as chairman and treasurer.3

Salt received considerable support from friends and supporters. Salt worked with the RSPCA and other organisations, and made systematic and consistent protests against numerous “barbarisms”.

Not all of his support came from the ‘Left’. The Hon. Fitzroy Stewart, Secretary, Conservative Office, supported him on the question of stag-hunting, and is but one of many examples. Salt also enlisted many able people to carry out reform of criminal law and prison reform.

In 1919 the Humanitarian League disbanded due to the domestic pressures of the war and its ageing membership4, but also the death of Salt’s wife in February 1919. Salt recognised that the Humanitarian League in its day was largely a forlorn hope but with would have far reaching effects by carrying out the necessary groundwork for future reforms.

The League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports (LPCS) was founded by Henry B. Amos and Ernest Bell, to continue the work of the Humanitarian League’s cruel sports department.

Salt wrote in 1930: “Its long effort to ameliorate certain sports was not in reality wasted and has now been made evident by the success of a later League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports”.

Humanitarian League Objectives:

Aims and Objects
What It Is, and What It Is Not

Press Reports

Further Reading:

  1. Weinbren, Dan (1994). “Against All Cruelty: The Humanitarian League, 1891-1919”. History Workshop (38): 86–105. ↩︎
  2. Salt, Henry S. (1921), Seventy Years Among Savages, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., p. 122. ↩︎
  3. Ibid., pp. 124-125. ↩︎
  4. The Humanitarian, April and September 1919. ↩︎