George Meredith, for the last ten or twelve years of his life, was a friend and supporter of the League. “On a point or two of your advocacy,” he wrote to me, “I am not in accord with you, but fully upon most.” He declared the steel trap to be “among the most villainous offences against humanity”; and he more than once signed the League’s memorials against such spurious sports as rabbit-coursing and stag-hunting. When the Royal Buckhounds were abolished in 1891, he wrote to us: “Your efforts have gained their reward, and it will encourage you to pursue them in all fields where the good cause of sport, or any good cause, has to be cleansed of blood and cruelty. So you make steps in our civilization.” Mr. Thomas Hardy more than once lent his name to the League’s petitions, and recognized that in its handling of the problem of animals’ rights it was grappling with the question “of equal justice all round.” In an extremely interesting letter, read at the annual meeting in 1910, he expressed his opinion that “few people seem to perceive fully, as yet, that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called the Golden Rule from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom.” This was, of course, the main contention of the Humanitarian League. In 1896 the League addressed an appeal to a number of leading artists, asking them to make it plain that their sympathies were on the humanitarian side, and that they would at least not be abettors of that spirit of cruelty which is the ally and companion of ugliness. Very few replies were received, but among them was one from Mr. G. F. Watts, who, in becoming a member, wrote us a letter on the cruelty of docking horses’ tails (“barbarous in those who practise it, infinitely degrading in those who encourage it from so mean a motive as fashion--only not contemptible because so much worse”), which was very widely published in the press, and did great service in bringing an odious fashion into disrepute. Mr. Walter Crane was another artist who gave support on many occasions to humanitarian principles; so, too, was Mr. Martin Anderson (“Cynicus”), who employed on the League’s behalf his great powers as a satirist in a cartoon which castigated the tame deer hunt.