For ten years, from 1891 to 1901, the League made the Royal Buckhounds serve as a “peg”--and a very useful peg it was--on which to hang an exposure of the cruelty of stag-hunting.[34] The doings of the Buckhounds were watched from season to season; detailed accounts of the “runs” were published, in contradiction of the shuffling reports sent to the papers by patrons of the Hunt, and a number of horrible cases of mutilation were dragged into light. Questions were put in Parliament; leaflets, articles, and press letters printed in hundreds, and many lectures given at various clubs and institutions. In this work we had the sympathy of many distinguished public men and the support of a section of the press (notably of the _Star_, which was then edited by Mr. Ernest Parke); but every possible difficulty was put in our way by officials, whether of the Court, the Government, or the Hunt, who in this case, as in all, desired nothing more than to save themselves trouble by letting things go on as before. Red tape cared little whether carted stags continued to be disembowelled on iron palings and worried by hounds. For example, when, in 1898, we wished to lay before Queen Victoria the case _against_ the Royal Hunt, in answer to Lord Ribblesdale’s book, _The Queen’s Hounds_, her private secretary, Sir A. Bigge, refused to bring the League’s publications to her notice; the Home Secretary also declined to do so, and so did the Prime Minister, each and all of them cordially advising us to apply elsewhere. Thus thwarted, we hit on the expedient of _petitioning_ the Queen to allow the counter-case to be sent to her, and in this way the Home Office was finally forced to do what it had declared to be “contrary to practice.” The Queen, as we had known since 1891, from a private letter addressed to Mr. Stratton by Sir Henry Ponsonby, had been “strongly opposed to stag-hunting for many years past”; and when this fact was published after her death it settled the fate of the Buckhounds. Looking back twenty years and more, it is comical to find the followers of the Royal Hunt trying to exploit the visit of the German Emperor, in 1899, in order to bolster up the failing reputation of their sport. They were very anxious that a “meet” of the Buckhounds should be one of the entertainments provided for the Kaiser, and on November 24th, in expectation of his being present, an unusually large company assembled; but the Humanitarian League had been beforehand in the matter, a letter of protest which it had addressed to the Prince of Wales had the desired effect, and the Kaiser had an engagement elsewhere. Had he been present, he would, as it happened, have seen a deer staked and done to death in the manner which was far from uncommon, and he would have learnt (if he had any doubt on the subject) that “Huns” are not entirely confined to Germany.