THE IL S; P.C. A.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sin,—With respect to your article in last week's Spectator, I feel sure that all who detest all cruelty to animals will agree to endorse your category of objects worthy of the strenuous support of the R.S.P.C.A. But I think it is a little hard on those who are striving to awaken the present somnolent Council to activity in all these and other directions that you should characterize their efforts as " bickerings."
For many years past many of us who have been almost life-long members of the Society have been endeavouring to rouse the Council to a sense of their immense responsibilities as managers of the greatest humane society in the world, but in vain. As long ago as the year 1900 I proposed and carried with only two dissentients, at the annual meeting of the members at the Mansion House, with the Lord Mayor in the chair, this resolution : " That it be an instruction from thfa general meeting of the subscribers to this Society that a corn- mittee forthwith prepare a Bill and secure its presentation to Parliament, the object of which shall be to make otter hunting illegal." From that day to this the Council have entirely ignored that resolution.
After many years of peaceful endeavours, of which this reso- lution was the first, all of which have been treated with con- tempt- by the Council, many of the members at last have become roused to serious anger, and are determined to elect upon the Council persons whose chief amusement is- not hunting animals to death ; persons who are not inclined to fall prostrate before any Departmental whitewashing com- mittee ; and persons who will not refrain from doing what the Society was formed to do for fear of annoying more illustrious persons.
These efforts are inspired by nothing but a genuine deter- mination to render the great Society efficient for its declared purposes ; they are not inspired by any desire to " bicker." Reforms cannot be achieved without some disturbance in this field of effort as in any other.
The majority of the present Council have resorted to all manner of devices, such as an endeavour to establish proxies at the annual meetings and the taking of polls of members with only the Council's views and opinion laid before those members, to stem the rising tide of dissatisfaction with their inanition.
None of these devices will avail to stop those who hate all cruelties going forward with their movement to purge the Council of the temporizers who will not strenuously bring the Society into the fighting-line against those cruelties.
A week or two ago a than was fined one pound for beating a seal with an iron bar till its eyeball was hanging out of the socket, and then showing it alive and groaning to the public for twopence a view. The Society did nothing to rouse the public, nor to protest to the Home Office against such a sen- tence, nor to draw attention to it in Parliament by a question. They sat silent and let the fine appear to satisfy them as an adequate punishment.
It is surely hard on us who are moved to anger at this supineness, and who endeavour to put an end to it, to tell us we are " bickering."—I am, Sir, &c.,
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