CRUELTY BEGINS AT HOME Dryden has somewhere a phrase, "the
fury of their kind- ness," which exactly hits off the temper of last week's annual meeting of the R.S.P.C.A. For two hours there was almost continuous uproar. The platform was rushed. People jumped on chairs, shouting at each other the hooligan commonplaces of modern Parliamentary debate. While some members, hop- ping up and down in their excitement, cried : "Turn out the vivisectors and the hunting men," others laid hands on a literary gentleman (the type is always suspect) and, in the process of ejecting him on to his head, "practically "—to use his own words—" tore him limb from limb." Many will deplore an occurrence of this sort, holding it to be undignified and ludicrous ; but for our part we welcome it. In the first place, it serves as a reminder that there is no synthetic sub- stitute for human folly. However lofty their purposes, men will go on making fools of themselves in the me:t preposterous and improbable ways. You can steal a march on the baser instincts of brute creation by such devices as an electric hare ; but not even an electric chairman could prevent well-meaning people from behaving like imbeciles every now and then. We cannot be too often taught that folly is eternal. In the second place, such incidents as that of the R.S.P.C.A. meeting provide a striking contradiction of the theory that modern life is hum- drum, and lacks dramatic value. Two years ago, a riot at Auburn Penitentiary let loose a flood of American films dealing with the major crises of prison life. If only one of our own producers had the enterprise and what is called the " vision " to dramatize the annual reunion of these champions of the defenceless and the dumb, we should at last see a British him of which the best that could be said, on the other side of the Atlantic, would not be that it is "redolent of the quiet charm of the English countryside." Mont.
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