THE PLUMAGE BILL. [TO THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR.")
Sin,—The pressure of more serious work has prevented me from making an earlier reply to the letter from Mr. H. Y. Massingham which appeared in your issue of June 26th, and as the Plumage Bill has since then died a somewhat unnatural, but not (as I must still think) an undeserved, death, it might seem that no reply were needed. None the less, I venture to ask for a little of your space in order to justify myself on one point.
In a letter which you published on June 19th I said that the
British Minister at Caracas, in a Report made eleven years ago, "estimated that 25 per cent. of the feathers exported from Venezuela were dropped feathers which the birds had shed naturally." Mr. Massingham declared this to be "an astound- ing misrepresentation of our Minister's statement," and asked whether I was not perhaps quoting from a trade circular. My answer is that I was not quoting from any trade circular, but was paraphrasing the Minister's actual words, which, as Mr. Massingham will find, if he looks at the original Report and not at an abbreviated version of it, ran as follows: "The estimates as to the exact proportions vary slightly, but 75 per cent. may be taken as a reliable figure for the proportion of feathers collected from birds killed, and 25 per cent. for the proportion of moulted feathers collected."
The point is of some importance, because the supporters of
the Plumage Bill have always maintained that the collection and export of moulted feathers was a myth. Yet here is the British Minister at Caracas specifically stating that as long ago as 1909 dropped feathers formed 25 per cent, of the total. The estimate, as I have said in your columns, was even then considered a low one, "and there is no reasonable doubt that the percentage to-day is very much higher, and that at least three-fourths—some authorities even put it at between 80 and 90 Der cent.—of the egret feathers that reach the London market from Venezuela are dropped feathers, discarded by the birds at the end of the breeding season, and collected without the slightest suspicion of cruelty either to them or their nestlings."
I do not, however, wish to touch on controversial matters, but merely to defend myself against the charge—to a publicist of any standing the very disagreeable charge—of having misquoted or in any way misrepresented the Report of a public servant.—
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