It is twenty-five years since the Humanitarian League was formed at the suggestion of Mr. Howard Williams, known to all of us as the author of “The Ethics of Diet.” We think it may prove interesting to our readers to give a brief sketch of some of the stages through which the League has passed. Its work is in many ways closely allied with our own and one of the subjects specially treated by the League is Humane Diet and Dress. Many of its members are also members of the Vegetarian Society and we are indebted for the following particulars to Mr. Henry S. Salt, who has been intimately connected with the Humanitarian League and is a vice-president of the Vegetarian Society.
It was at the house of Mrs, Lewis (now Mrs. Drakoules), in Park Square, London, that a small group of persons, among whom were Mrs. Lewis, Mr. Edward Maitland, Mr. Howard Williams, Mr. Kenneth Romanes, and Mr. Henry S. Salt, assembled early in 1891, to draw up a manifesto and to launch the Humanitarian League. The title “humanitarian” was chosen because, though fully aware of certain objections to the word, it was felt that it was the only term which sufficiently expressed the object, and that, whether a good name or a bad name, it must be taken up, like a gauntlet, by those who intended to fight for the cause which it denotes. For it was to be a fighting, not a talking Society that the League was designed, even if it were a forlorn hope. In an interesting letter, read at the first meeting, the opinion was expressed by the late Professor Francis W. Newman, that the time was not ripe for such a venture as the assertion of a humanitarian ethic; but a beginning might be made, much good would be done by a systematic protest against the numerous barbarisms of civilisation—the cruelties inflicted by men on men, and the not less atrocious ill-treatment of the lower animals. A treasurer (Mrs. Lewis) was appointed, and an honorary secretary (Mr. H. S. Salt), whose rooms in Gloucester Road were for four years the only “office” which the League could boast. There were about 100 members. Pamphlets were issued from time to time, and occasional meetings held at Rathbone Place, or at the Ideal Club in Tottenham Court Road.
The Committee was gradually strengthened by the inclusion of such experienced workers as the Rev. J. Stratton, Colonel W. Lisle B. Coulson, Mrs. L. T. Mallet, Miss Elizabeth Martyn and Mr. Ernest Bell, who was for eighteen years a bulwark of strength as chairman and treasurer. It was in 1895 that the second phase of the League’s career began with the acquirement of an office in Great Queen Street and the institution of a monthly journal, “Humanity,” so called at first because the title “Humanitarian” was at that time appropriated elsewhere. The holding of a National Humanitarian Conference, at St. Martin’s Town Hall, in the same year, was the first big public effort that the League made, and attracted a good deal of attention.
In the summer of 1897 the League shifted its headquarters to Chancery Lane, where it has remained to the present time, and has worked mainly for the amelioration of the criminal law and prison system and for the fuller recognition of the rights of animals.
It is now some fifteen years since the League began to draw attention to the school sport of hare-hunting, in which even zoophilists had previously acquiesced as a matter of course. A large amount of time and work has been devoted to the subject of the Eton Beagles, with the result that such pastimes are now widely condemned by thinking people, and the Admiralty has withdrawn the financial support which used to be given to the pack of hounds kept by the cadets of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. The Eton Beagles have thus been made, like the Royal Buckhounds, to serve the useful purpose of an “object-lesson,” and numbers of readers in every part of the kingdom have been led, by the help of a concrete instance, to think about an ethical question to which, in the abstract, they would not have attended at all.
A subject specially treated has been that of Humane Diet and Dress, in which department the League has been indebted to the services of Miss Gertrude L. Mallet as honorary secretary. While recognising that in vegetarianism lies the only full solution of the diet question, the Committee has actively pressed for an amelioration of the inhumanities of cattle-ship and slaughter-house, and for the establishment of public abattoirs in place of private shambles.
Other important matters with which this branch of the League has dealt are: vivisection, the treatment of domestic animals, the destruction of birds, the fur trade, and the barbarities of the “Zoo.” A word must be said in recognition of the excellent educational work done by the Children’s Department, which has been under the direction of Miss J. Wade, and has had the aid of such well-known humane pioneers as Mrs. F. H. Suckling and Miss Edith Carrington.
The objects of the League are to humanise, as far as may be, the conditions of modern society, not merely by making protest against the many barbarous practices that have come down to us from the past, but by inducing people to recognise humanitarianism as a serious branch of ethics, instead of a spasmodic exercise of the instinct of compassion.
We venture to think, that the intellectual and controversial side of the League’s work has been of more value than is recognised; for before a new system could be built up the ground had to be cleared, and the main obstacle to humanitarianism had long been the very widespread contempt for what is known as “sentiment,” and the vulgar idea that humanitarians were a poor weakly folk whose hearts were “better than their heads.” “Twenty years of the Humanitarian League have changed all that; and a good many pompous persons who have come into collision with the League have emerged with modified views and a considerably enlarged experience.
In order to make the League an intellectual force—much attention was from the first bestowed upon its publications and lectures, and it may congratulate itself on having had the support, whether in the Humanitarian or the Humane Review, or the pamphlet series, of a number of distinguished writers, whose names could not fail to carry weight—as, for example, to mention but a few out of many, Mr. W. J. Stillman, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. Edward Carpenter, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Robert Buchanan, M. Elisée Reclus, Mr. W. H. Hudson, Mr. R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Sir Sydney Olivier, Mr. Ernest Crosby, “Ouida,” Mr. Edmund Selous, Professor J. Howard Moore, Mr. George Greenwood, Mrs. Mona Caird, Mr. G. W. Foote, Mr. W. H. S. Monck (“Lex”), Mr. Howard Williams, Dr. Frederika Macdonald, Lady Florence Dixie, Miss Edith Carrington, Mr. Clarence Darrow, Rev. J. Verschoyle, Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner, Mr. John M. Robertson, Dr. W. E. A. Axon, Dr. T. Baty, Mr. W. J. Jupp, the Rev. Dr. H. B. Gray, Professor W. J. Roberts and Dr. Plato Drakoules.
The Humanitarian League’s publications have been widely distributed, and some of them have been translated into various European languages.
We read in the Report for 1915:—“It is unfortunate that on the completion of its twenty-fifth year—an occasion when it is usual for a propagandist Society to take a retrospective view of its doings—the Humanitarian League should find its sphere of work most seriously restricted by the long continuance of a war which has, for the time, made a widespread advocacy of humane principles well-nigh impossible. In this respect the position of the League is one of peculiar difficulty, inasmuch as its main object is not to effect some particular and single reform, but to inculcate a general and far-reaching ethic of benevolence; and this ethic, under present conditions, is necessarily unable to secure the attention that it deserves, Yet it is none the less a fact that our various humanitarian subjects, for which it is so difficult in war-time to gain any public attention, are in reality of the utmost importance in their bearing on the causes of war itself; for until a nation is truly civilised in each and all of its usages, it is idle to expect that it will at all times be able to resist the barbarous tendency to settle international disputes by the sword. The need for a Humanitarian League has become greater, not less, as a result of the war; and when the war ceases it is proposed that the work of the League shall be continued on such lines as may then be deemed expedient.”
With its May number, the Humanitarian resumed its monthly issue; but with this difference, that it has, for the time being, doffed its cover, and re-appears in the less ornate form which it bore until January, 1906. The Committee are of opinion that what is lost in appearance will be more than compensated by the advantage of regular publication, the interruption of which has been much regretted, and that the restoration of this link between all members of the League is of more importance at the present time than the holding of meetings which only London members can attend.
Henry S. Salt
The Vegetarian Messenger and Health Review, Vol. XIII No. 6, June 1916, pp. 128-130