THE PLUMAGE BILL.
[To THE „EDITOR or rits " Bezarssoa."l Sae—Readers of Mr. Brooks's clever and insidious defence of a bad cause will have noticed that he utterly ignores the ethical, scientific, economic, and aesthetic points of view deeply involved in this sanguinary traffic. The loveliness of the incom- parable children of forest, shore, mountain, and plain, sacri- ficed in the exercise of their parental responsibilities for the vulgar demands of fashion; the debasement of the moral currency of civilized nations consequent upon a misuse of power (for the sake of a wretched barbaric ornament) far grosser than the instinct of one animal to kill another for the necessities of existence; the stimulus to disease and famine through the destruction of the natural enemies of the insects which cause them; the threat to the continuity of the evolu- tionary process—that aspect Mr. Brooks does not so much as trouble himself to discuss. All the continuity that bothers him is that of the turnover of a handful of profiteers. Let us, then, fix -in our minds, as Mr. Brooks would wish, that man is the 'fiercest of all the beasts of prey, and come to business.
(1) The injury to the ostrich and feather industry. Mr. Brooks is very careful to conceal from his readers the radical -distinction between the ostrich farmer and the ostrich dealer. The feather trade in England is (if my readers will forgive the repetition) the " Ostrich and Fancy Feather Trade Associa- tion." The South African ostrich farmers are totally different. They have always favoured a Plumage Bill; they favour this -one; not only because, being engaged in a decent trade, they probably dislike a cruel and murderous one, but for the not very recondite reason that the Bill will remove a serious com- petitor from their business. The losses the ostrich farmers have suffered are due partly to the war, partly to the fashion for wearing the bodies and plumage of humming birds, egrets. paradise birds, terns, kingfishers, albatrosses, &c. The Bill will clear the decks for the ostrich farmer, and, not being an imbecile, he supports it.
(2) The protection of egrets in Venezuela. The actual truth is that the Venezuelan Government supports the Plumage Trade because it is a source of revenue to them. The Government is for and naturally encourages a trade by which its export duties bear' t. But let us presume that the Venezuelan Government has eached a higher standard of civilization (since, beins poorer, it stands to lose more by discouraging the traffic) than the United States, and that the protection laws there are what they appear to be. Now Florida is a smaller country than Venezuela, •and its affairs are administered by a much more highly organized Government. Yet Florida was unable to save not only its egrets from the plume hunters but even its game wardens from murder by them. Let the shades of Guy Bradley stand as a witness to his assassination, when endeavour- ing to protect the egrets under his charge from the human, employees of the Plumage Trade, wandering the country to pick up the discarded feathers of its birds. Mr. Brooks has either the ignorance or the audacity to quote the British Minister at Caracas in support of the trade, when what he actually said (I have his words before me) was :—" The vast majority of the plumes (egrets') are obtained by the slaughter of the birds in the breeding season, and no effective measures exist or indeed, owing to local oouditions, can exist for the control of this slaughter." Is Mr. Brooks perhaps quoting from a trade circular? These circulars are not meant to reach the eyes of people who know. They are for the woman who shops. They state that the plumes of the little white egret are picked up and exported from India in large numbers, though in com- mittee, the vile insinuation that smuggling was practised by the trade was indignantly repudiated by the trade's principal champion—Mr. Denniss. Even they do not quite dare to say that ostrich feathers are excluded by the Bill from import, but they sail pretty close to 'the wind, and if I was ignorant about the trade and its tricks, that would be the impression I should receive from them. People who make their money by blood will not hesitate to draw mendacities, and this possibly is the genesis of Mr. Brooks's astounding misrepresentation of our Minister's statement. The High Commissioner of New Zealand again declared in the Times of April last that lie had the utmost difficulty to save the last colony of rare birds in New Zealand from the plume hunters. What chance, then, have the Venezuelan egrets, nesting in a country nearly as big as Europe, and in its uninhabited wilder- nesses where no man can see, much lees prevent the evil that is done? All this, of course, leaves out of account the state- ments of Mr. Albert Pam of the Council of the London Zoologi- cal Society, and others of equal distinction, that the egrets are invariably slaughtered in the breeding season in Venezuela, and that the idea of the plumes "being moultedfeathers may be absolutely set aside." Does any average sensible person imagine that the plume-hunter is going to bother himself to hunt up and down the country for hundreds of miles to pick up a few
rotting, discoloured and worn plumes out of swamps when he can secure them in the finest condition by shooting out a colony?
(3) I will touch upon the rest of Mr. Brooks's remarks as briefly as possibly. One of his arguments appears to be that the greater the commercial demand for an article, the more it will increase. How obliging of Nature! What a pity she has been rather backward in learning economics! Those thirteen out of eighteen species of humming birds exterminated by the trade in Jamaica alone might have been saved; the passenger pigeon which fifty years ago darkened the sky with its numbers would not now be extinct ; the flamingo, condor, cock o the rock, various species of Paradise birds, the egret in Asia, Europe, and North America, the lyre bird, the pelican, the bustard, various species of tern and sandpiper along the Pacific coast, the Guatemala trogons, the New Guinea browned pigeons, &c., would not now be reduced by the trade from plenty to a miserable fraction of their former numbers. It is so likely that birds which must be massacred in the breeding season because of the brilliance of their plumage at that time will increase their numbers under the stimulus of such attentions! London is the largest open market for feathers in the world; only the other day the French plume traders protested against our Bill because of its expected reaction upon their own trade. So much for the silly, oft-repeated cry that the Bill will only drive the trade abroad. And what if it did? Because my neighbour never washes his linen, that is no excuse for keeping mine dirty. Lastly, there is the gentle insinuation that the leopard is changing its spots. A book has just been published describing how the hunters poisoned one of the Venezuelan rivers to get at an inaccessible colony of egrets; its author is the traveller, Lieut. Leo Miller. A few months ago I received a letter from an old sailor on the China station, describing the shooting out of the last colony of egrets in the Nanking province and the starving of the young. The birds, he said, continued to bring food to their young "even when wounded." That was in October of last year. How is it possible for the abominable cruelties of this traffic to diminish when the birds have to be :rot in the breeding season, and the hunting is necessarily entrusted in the wilder districts to natives? In fact, the only way to defend a bad cause is by bad knowledge or by bad faith.—I am, Sir, &c., H. J. MASSINGHAbf, " Plumage Bill Group."
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