But it is not often that one hears of a case like that of Tetty: as a rule, disappointment lurks in the hopes that flatter the humanitarian mind. We had a neighbour in Surrey, an old woman living in an adjoining cottage, who professed full adherence to our doctrine that cats should not be allowed to torture captured birds. “I always take them away from my cat: I can’t bear to see them suffering,” she said. We warmly approved of this admirable sentiment. But then, as she turned aside, she added quietly: “Unless, of course, they’re sparrows.” A year or two ago the papers described a singular accident at a railway station, where a cow got on the line and was wedged between the platform and a moving train: the cow, we were told, was killed, “but fortunately there was no personal injury”--a view of the occurrence which seemed, to a humanitarian, still stranger than the accident itself. Here, again, is an instance of unintended humour: “Homeward Bound” as the title of a cheerful picture in which a bronzed sailor is represented returning from the tropics, carrying--a caged parrot. It is this traditional habit of regarding the lower animals not as persons and fellow-beings, but as automata and “things,” that lies behind the determined refusal to recognize that they have rights, and is thus ultimately responsible for much of the callousness with which they are treated. With this superstition the League was in conflict from the first. But perhaps some of my readers may still think that time spent on the rights of animals is so much taken away from the great human interests that are at stake. Let us help men first, they may argue, and then, when mankind is righted, we can help the animals after. On the other hand, there are some zoophilists who take the contrary view that men can help themselves, and that it is the animals first and foremost who need aid and protection. The League’s opinion was that both these arguments are mistaken, and, for the same reason, viz. that, in our complex modern society, all great issues of justice or injustice are crossed and intermingled, so that no one cruelty can be singled out as the source of all other cruelties, nor can any one reform be fully realized apart from the rest. By “humanitarian” we meant one who feels and acts humanely, not towards mankind only, or the lower animals only, but towards all sentient life--one who adopts the Humanitarian League’s principle that “it is iniquitous to inflict avoidable suffering on any sentient being.” We did not regard as humanitarians, for example, those “philanthropic” persons who, having made a fortune by commercial competition, in which the depreciation of wages was a recognized method, afterwards gave back a portion of their wealth in “charity.” This might, perhaps, be philanthropy, but it did not seem to be quite humanity. Nor did we think that the name “humanitarian” should be given to those zoophilists or