Twenty-four years’ work with the Humanitarian League had left many problems unsolved, many practical matters undecided; but on one point some of us were now in no sort of uncertainty--that a race which still clung tenaciously to the practices at which I have glanced in the foregoing chapters was essentially barbaric, not in its diet only, though the butchery of animals for food had first arrested our attention, but also, and not less glaringly, in its penal system, its sports, its fashions, and its general way of regarding that great body of our fellow-beings whom we call “the animals.” It did not need Mr. Howard Moore’s very suggestive book, _Savage Survivals_,[40] to convince us of this; but we found in the conclusions reached by him an ample corroboration of those we had long had in mind, and which alone could explain the stubborn adherence of educated as well as uneducated classes to a number of primitive and quite uncivilized habits. “It is not possible,” he says, “to understand the things higher men do, nor to account for the things that you find in their natures, unless you recognize the fact that higher men are merely savages made over and only partially changed.” Professor F. W. Newman’s warning, that the time was not ripe for a Humanitarian League, had to this extent been verified: if we had thought that we were going to effect any great visible changes, we should have been justly disappointed. But those who work with no expectation of seeing results cannot be disappointed; they are beyond the scope of failure, and may even meet, as we did, with some small and unforeseen success. The League was thus, in the true sense of the term, a Forlorn Hope; that is, a troop of venturesome pioneers, who were quite untrammelled by “prospects,” and whose whim it was to open out a path by which others might eventually follow. Perhaps the success of the League lay less in what it did than in what it _demanded_--less, that is, in the defeat of a flogging Bill, or in the abolition of a cruel sport, than in the fearless, logical, and unwavering assertion of a clear principle of humaneness, which applies to the case of human and non-human alike. After all, it does not so greatly matter whether this or that particular form of cruelty is prohibited; what matters is that _all_ forms of cruelty should be shown to be incompatible with progress. Here, I venture to think, the intellectual and controversial side of the League’s work was of some value; for before a new system could be built up, the ground had to be cleared, and the main obstacle to humanitarianism had long been the very widespread contempt for what is known as “sentiment,” and the idea that humanitarians were a poor weakly folk who might be ridiculed with impunity. The Humanitarian League changed all that; and a good many pompous persons, who had come into collision with its principles, emerged with modified views and a considerably enlarged experience.