In spite of the veneer of our boasted civilisation, we are all still savages. Such, in effect, is the theme of Mr. Henry S. Salt’s “Seventy Years Among Savages” (Allen and Unwin, 12s. 6d.), the particular savages with whom he is concerned in this book being, of course, the British public. Mr. Salt himself (which is quite as it should be) is very far from savage—in his methods of castigation, anyhow. He does not lash us ferociously in the Juvenalian style. Rather, he rallies us genially, after the manner of Horace. The comic side of our modern savagery tickles him quite as much as the tragic side of it saddens him. The reminiscences of many years, out of which he illustrates his themes are tinged throughout with an agreeable vein of humour, and enlivened with frequent strokes of wit and a number of amusing anecdotes. Had there been no theme, no serious purpose behind, these reminiscences would still have made entertaining reading, merely on their merits as reminiscences.
They cover nearly the whole of Mr. Salt’s life, as a Colleger at Eton, as an undergraduate at King’s Cambridge, as a master at Eton, as an author of many works against divers of the barbarities of civilisation, and as prime mover in the recently defunct Humanitarian League. And he expatiates in the book upon the many forms of savagery against which he has been up in the course of his long and varied career—moral, intellectual, and physical, from the bad ethics, or, rather, lack of any ethics, in our educational system, to the horrid cannibalism of slaying and eating “the large-brained cow.” For from Mr. Salt’s view-point, the consumption of butcher’s meat is cannibalism in a literal sense, holding, as he does, that the brutes (as we wrongly call them) do not differ from man in kind, but merely in degree, and therefore that in eating them we are, in effect, eating our own poor relations. This, to be sure, is no new contention; it has been advanced by certain kindly folk in all ages. Some have even carried it farther than that, and have elevated the lower animals to the rank of gods. But that, perchance, is carry civilisation a trifle too far.
Mr. Salt is on surer ground in his protest against the killing of animals for sport, more particularly such iniquities as the coursing of tame rabbits and the shooting of trapped pigeons, to which no defence on any principles of humanity is possible. The same remark applies pretty generally to the slaughter of birds for their plumage and of furry animals for their skins, usually by callously cruel methods, the very description of which makes on sick. Mr. Salt expresses the right of the furry creature to its own skin in one of him many happily concise phrases: “One animal, one skin.” This is at once good wit and good humanity.
Mr. Salt, in one passage, is down on “mashing” wasps. The present writer rather agrees about that. He himself seldom “mashes” a wasp—not entirely on humane grounds, but rather because the wasp preys on the much more obnoxious house-fly. Yet, if the “right” of the wasp not to be “mashed” be allowed, as a matter of principle, presumably the said house-fly itself has the same right, not to mention the flea, and even the bug. There are wheels within wheels here. The problem of the “rights” of the lower creation is not quite so simple as might appear.
In the course of his career, Mr. Salt came across any number of well-known and interesting people, mostly savage, but some few civilised, and has much to say about them in these reminiscences. But space forbids to enter into further details. Enough to say that every reader, even the savagest, will thoroughly enjoy the book. For this is such a genial, kindly, humorous Gulliver, who simply can’t be nasty, even when, more in sorrow than in anger, he has to animadvert upon the very wildest savageries of us Yahoos.
Truth, February 2, 1921, 206-208
Book Reviewed: Seventy Years Among Savages