Against All Cruelty: The Humanitarian League 1891-1919

The Humanitarian League was a London-based radical pressure group which espoused ‘humane principles on a rational basis’. It existed between 1891 and 1919 as part of a broader movement promoting alternatives to industrial progress, economic liberalism and hell-fire Protestantism. The League aimed to bolster links between radicals and to pioneer a ‘welldefined and unmistakeable standard of humaneness’ through legislative changes which would aid the cultivation of people’s innate sympathy rather than encourage selfish individualism. It opposed vivisection, compulsory vaccination and the trade in, ill-treatment or killing of animals. Members also campaigned for Poor Law and Criminal Law reform, for the public control of a number of trades and institutions, for arbitration as a means of resolving international disputes and for greater public access to the countryside.League members were frequently and have continued to be marginalized as cranks of limited significance. There has however been some recognition of the significance of certain League activists: the first systematic guide to animal rights literature, published ninety-nine years after the League was formed, is dedicated to the League’s founder, Henry Salt; and another recent work has suggested that today’s debate about the moral status of animals ‘would have bemused the Victorians, with the exception, perhaps of Henry Salt’. Nevertheless, assessments have generally ignored the broad perspective of the League and have thus broken the links that it sought to strengthen.It is difficult to measure the full extent to which the League managed to ‘supplement and reinforce’ disparate progressive movements; to cultivate, through organization and legislation, the ‘common sympathetic imagination’ which was to be found within everybody; and to ‘focus scattered and isolated compassionate sentiment [into] an energetic whole’. However there were clear successes. League campaigns led to legislation to ban miniature zoos in London and some hunting and flogging; and the League also influenced legislation on Prisons (1898), on Criminal Justice and Criminal Appeals (1912) and on Plumage (1921). Its activities led to changes within the Howard Association and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and it inspired the environmental movement. The League is also of interest not only because of its achievements but because its rise and fall are an exemplar of the fate of liberal England during its crisis.

Part I of this essay sketches the foundation of the League and the basis of its ideas, which were reactions to Darwin and to mid-century Christian orthodoxy. Part II is an outline of the League’s structure, and Part III an analysis of the ways in which the League, in order to promote the broad goal of Humanitarianism, worked within conventional perimeters, by lobbying the influential for specific changes and highlighting individual cases and individual solutions to the general social malaise that it discerned.

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