Perhaps no better test of a people’s civilization could be found than in the manner of their religious festivals. What of our Christmas--the season when peace and goodwill take the form of a general massacre followed by a general gormandizing, with results not much less fatal to the merry-makers than to their victims? One would think that a decent cannibal would be sickened by the shows of live cattle, fattened for the knife, and thousands of ghastly carcases hung in the butchers’ shops; but, on the contrary, the spectacle is everywhere regarded as a genial and festive one. The protests which the Humanitarian League used to make, in letters to ministers of religion and other persons of influence, met with hardly any response; sometimes a press-writer would piously vindicate the sacred season, as “Dagonet” once did in the _Referee_: “We are, of course, from a certain point of view, barbarians in our butchery of beasts for the banquet. The spectacle of headless animals hanging on hooks and dripping with blood is not æsthetic. But Nature is barbarous in her methods, and it is a law of Nature that one set of live things should live upon another set of live things. To kill and eat is a natural instinct. To denounce it as inhuman is not only absurd, but in a sense impious.” Piety and pole-axe, it will be seen, go together, in the celebration of the Christian Saturnalia. Christmas comes but once a year: Let this our anguish soften! For who could bide that season drear Of bogus mirth and gory cheer, If it came more often? From Religion, then, as such, the League expected nothing and got nothing; but it must be owned that its failure to obtain any substantial help from the Labour movement was something of a disappointment; for though not a few leaders, men such as Keir Hardie, J. R. Clynes, J. R. Macdonald, Bruce Glasier, and George Lansbury, were good friends to our cause, the party, as a whole, showed little interest in the reforms which we advocated, even in matters which specially concerned the working classes, such as the Vagrancy Act, the Game Laws, and the use of the cane in Board Schools. As for the non-humans, it is a curious fact that while the National Secular Society includes among its immediate practical objects a more humane treatment of animals, and their legal protection against cruelty, the Labour movement, like the Churches, has not cared to widen its outlook even to the extent of demanding better conditions for the more highly organized domestic animals.