Take examples of the senseless slaughter. It is the nuptial
feathers of egrets in which the traders deal, and this means that the feathers have to be torn from the mother birds while the young are still in the nests. The young birds are loft to die in their thousands. Canon Rawnsley says that on the average 150,000 albatrosses are similarly left to die of hemorrhage every year. Nobody, we think, could or should object to feathers of birds being worn when the birds are killed in the ordinary way for food. What, for example, is more decorative than a pheasant's feathers ? But it passes our imagination how any woman can be so cruel as to wear the plumes taken from wild birds which are slaughtered only because of those plumes. It might be a good exercise for those who wear the feathers of an albatross, and who do not find it easy to be haunted by remorse, to read " The Ancient Mariner," say once a year.
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