It was in 1895 that the second phase of the League’s career began with the acquirement of an office in Great Queen Street, and the institution of a monthly journal, _Humanity_, so-called at first because its later title, _The Humanitarian_, was at that time appropriated elsewhere. The holding of a National Humanitarian Conference, at St. Martin’s Town Hall, in the same year, was the first big public effort that the League had made, and attracted a good deal of attention; and the scope of the work was considerably extended by the appointment of special departments for dealing with such subjects as Sports, Criminal Law and Prison Reform, Humane Diet and Dress, and the Education of Children; and by a much wider use of the press as a medium for propaganda, in which sphere the League was now able to avail itself of the services of Mr. Joseph Collinson, whose numerous press letters soon became a distinctive feature of its work. In the summer of 1897 the League shifted its headquarters to Chancery Lane, where it remained till it was brought to an end in 1919. The League was soon engaged in controversies of various kinds. A little book entitled _Animals’ Rights_, which I wrote at the request of my friend, Mr. Ernest Bell, and which was published by his firm in 1892, led to a great deal of discussion, and passed through numerous editions, besides being translated into French, German, Dutch, Swedish, and other languages. Among its earliest critics was Professor D. G. Ritchie, who, in his work on _Natural Rights_, maintained that though “we may be said to have duties of _kindness towards_ the animals, it is incorrect to represent these as strictly _duties towards_ the animals themselves, as if they had rights against us.” (The italics are Mr. Ritchie’s.) There is a puzzle for you, reader. I took it to mean that, in man’s duty of kindness, it is the kindness only that has reference to the animals, the duty being a private affair of the man’s; the convenience of which arrangement is that the man can shut off the kindness whenever it suits him to do so, the kindness being, as it were, the water, and the duty the tap. For instance, when the question of vivisection arose, Mr. Ritchie at once turned off the water of kindness, though it had been very liberally turned on by him when he gave approval to the humanitarian protests against the barbarities of sport. To this sophistical hair-splitting, in a matter of much practical importance, we from the first refused to yield, and made it plain that it was no battle of words in which we were engaged but one of ethical conduct, and that while we were quite willing to exchange the term “rights” for a better one, if better could be found, we would not allow the concept either of human “duties” or of animals’ “rights” to be manipulated in the manner of which Mr. Ritchie’s book gave a conspicuous example. Meanwhile the word “rights” held the field.