THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF FASHION.
AFTER writing my article on the Plumage Trade in the October 25th issue of the Spectator, whose invaluable help and encouragement have earned not only our life-long gratitude but that of all civilized men who care for anything at all beyond the circle of their own achievements, the Plumage Bill movement suddenly found its own feet and sprang ahead in seven-leagued boots. The tangible result of my appeal was that I was enabled to found the " Plumage Bill Group " (Hon. Secretary, W. Dewar, 8 Kenilworth Court, Putney, S.W. 15), which spread itself over England, Scotland, and Wales in a twinkling, and has now become a popular movement of such power and consequence that we of . the London Group are finding it more and more difficult to deal with the pressure of business it entails. This wonderful flowering of conscience has, of course, nothing to do with us. It is not our work, any more than the solar and astral systems of the universe are the work of this minute atomy of earth. To what then are we to attribute it ?
The answer is : the absolute indefensibility of the traffic. It is literally true that there is not one single valid word, whether ethical, philosophical, scientific, religious, economic, artistic, or humane, to be said for it. It is as stupid as it is wicked, as wasteful as it is savage, as dangerous to human self-preservation as it is morally vile. Even the slave-traders might have argued, and did argue, that cheap labour had a case against humanity. True, there is cheap labour in the plumage trade-10s. to 15s. a week being the average earnings of the workers in it before the war—but the world will think twice before accepting an argument of that kind nowadays, especially when the employers are principally aliens. England, in short, has at last made up her mind that she will not stand by and see the bird-population of the world wiped out, under conditions of hardly credible brutality, to gorge the rapacity of a few East End traders, and to tickle the vanity of the heartless and mindless women who wear the feathers of wild birds slaughtered for fashion. She will not stand by and see her name discredited by the foreign adventurers who gather the fruits of their crimes within the shelter of her tolerance ; the natives of the lands which are ravaged by the traders debauched by rum and opium in ex, change for skins (see the evidence of Mr. W. Goodfellow, F.Z.S.) ; the laws of her Colonies set at naught by the tons of feathers smuggled into the Port of London ; or the myriads of birds indispensable both as objects of supreme natural beauty and grace, and as checks upon disease and famine, tortured and shot out in the breeding season—for so miserable a gain. This is the general and unanswerable charge which has turned the move- ment into a popular demand that the Government will ignore at their peril, and our office has been to disseminate the huge volume of facts which are the solid material of the charge and leave them to tell their own tale. The facts are going home at last, and this should be a consolation to those of us who con- template these butcheries as students of our fellow-men and see in the disappearance of the world's winged-and-warm-blooded races something even more than an irreparable loss to humanity, art, and science. For if this blasphemous work is accomplished—as very soon it must be—what shall it profit us or our children's children, however spiritualized and at creative peace with one another ? The process of unfolding consciousness, both as parable and reality, from the meanest and most mechanical beginnings, will have become utterly meaningless, a cruel practical joke, a child's castle of bricks smashed into chaos by its apex, a passionate effort towards life and beauty with nothing but ruin and negation at the approach of its triumph. Let human goodwill then save what is left of the birds from traders' money- bags and women's hats, so that it may save itself from the spectacle of the universe as a lie and a fraud.
Such being the charge, the reply of the traders to it is exactly what we should expect. As a matter of fact, no detailed answers to detailed accusation are so much as attempted, for sufficiently obvious reasons. The trade defence hardly courts the light, since the continuance of the trade depends entirely upon keeping the facts from public knowledge. When this defence does come out into the open, it is to utter generalizations about " cranks " and " fanatics," or " more plumage piffle " (sea Drapers' Record). Or the appeal is to human predacity and covetousness in the frankest possible way—don't let the chance of making money out of massacre leave England. But I will give here a specimen of the trade defence which draws its own moral. Science is almost unanimously with us against the trade, and the petition circulated last summer was filled by the names of the most eminent men of science in England. Yet there are some men of science who defend this traffic, and the other day an attack upon the cause and myself was made in the columns of Nature by a South African biologist, Mr. Duerden. His argument was (a) that we must not interfere with the " aesthetic instincts of mankind " ; (b) that wild birds should be farmed for their feathers ; (c) that France and the ostrich-farmers of South Africa would suffer by the suppression of the traffic ; (d) that the workers would suffer ; and (e) the usual appeal to predacity. I reply that if birds must be slaughtered at their nests for their finest quills or ornaments or whole bodies, I fail to see bow they can be farmed ; that only once in a holocaust of sixty years has the experiment been made (at Tunis), and that was a complete failure ; that the ostrich-farmers themselves happen to by in favour of a Government Plumage Bill ; and that as eighty per cent. of imported feathers leave England to be made up abroad, and the remaining twenty per cent. are worked by English labour which is also engaged in the artificial flower and ostrich feather industry, to stop the traffic would increase openings for labour.
Thus, just as cruelty and extinction (since the birds are slaughtered in the breeding season) go hand in hand with this trade, so the indictment against it embraces use, beauty, and humanity. It is with pleasure, therefore, that I am able to announce that a determined effort to stop the traffic is about to be made. The Government will not fix a date for their Bill, and so Colonel C. E. Yate has balloted for a Private Bill, which will be read a second time on April 30th. He is supported by Lady Astor, Sir John Butcher, Commander Dean, V.C., and Major Guest. Unhappily another Bill is to be read on the same day. Accordingly the " Plumage Bill Group " (with the hearty approval of our friend Colonel Yato) approached Lord Aberdeen, who will shortly introduce a Bill into the House of Lords. It is hoped that the Government will adopt one or other of
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