What we must unhesitatingly condemn is the blind and reckless barbarism which has ransacked, and is ransacking, whole provinces and continents, without a glimmer of suspicion that the birds and quadrupeds which it is rapidly exterminating have any other part or purpose in nature than to be sacrificed to human vanity, that idle gentlemen and ladies may bedeck themselves, like certain characters in the fable, in borrowed skins and feathers. What care _they_ for all the beauty and tenderness and intelligence of the varied forms of animal life? and what is it to them whether these be helped forward by man in the universal progress and evolution of all living things, or whether whole species be transformed and degraded by the way--boiled down, like the beaver, into a hat, or, like the seal, into a lady’s jacket? Whatever it may be in other respects, the fur trade, in so far as it is a supply of ornamental clothing for those who are under no necessity of wearing fur at all, is a barbarous and stupid business. It makes patchwork, one may say, not only of the hides of its victims, but of the conscience and intellect of its patrons. A fur garment or trimming, we are told, appearing to the eye as if it were one uniform piece, is generally made up of many curiously shaped fragments. It is significant that a society which is enamoured of so many shams and fictions, and which detests nothing so strongly as the need of looking facts in the face, should pre-eminently esteem those articles of apparel which are constructed on the most deceptive and illusory principle. The story of the Ass in the Lion’s skin is capable, it seems, of a new and wider application. Cruel as is all hunting of animals for their fur, there is a peculiar callousness in the seal “fishery,” not only because the seal, far from being a fish, is one of the most sensitive of warm-blooded animals, but because of the atrocious methods by which the practice of “sealing” has too often been pursued. In all the history of man’s dealings with the lower races, there is no bloodier record than that of his treatment of the trustful and unresisting seal. But if the fur trade gives cause for serious reflection, what are we to say of the still more abominable trade in feathers? Murderous, indeed, is the millinery which finds its most fashionable ornament in the dead bodies of birds--birds, the loveliest and most blithesome beings in Nature! It has been said that “to enumerate all the feathers used for ornamental purposes would be practically to give a complete list of all known and obtainable birds.” The figures and details published by those humane writers who have raised an unavailing protest against this latest and worst crime of Fashion are really appalling in their stern and naked record of unremitting cruelty.