Mr. John Colam, for many years Secretary of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was a well-known figure in the zoophilist movement at the time of which I am speaking, and had a great reputation for astuteness. Wily he certainly was, with the vast experience he had acquired in evading the double pressure of those who cried “forward” and of those who cried “back”; and he was a veritable Proteus in the skill with which he gave the slip to any one who tried to commit him to any course but the safest. He used privately to allege the backwardness of his Committee as a cause for this seeming timidity; thus he told me in 1901, when the fate of the Royal Buckhounds was hanging in the balance, that the R.S.P.C.A. was unable to take any public action, not from any remissness on his part, but because certain members of the Committee were afraid of alienating subscribers, including King Edward himself. Personally I liked Mr. Colam; he was humane so far as his interests permitted, and when one had realized, once for all, the uselessness of attempting to bind him to any fixed purpose, it was instructive to have an occasional talk with him at Jermyn Street, and to observe the great adroitness with which he conducted the affairs of the Society; and he, on his part, when he saw that one had no longer any ethical designs on him, but approached him rather as a fellow-student, albeit a mere amateur, in the art of dealing with unreasonable people, would become chatty and confidential and tell amusing stories of a Secretary’s adventures. He would have made a successful Prime Minister, for his “wizardry” was of the highest order; as a humanitarian he left something to be desired.