On the 8th January 2010 we removed the old Henry S. Salt website and replaced it with this temporary site whilst work continues on the new site. If you require any details or articles from the old website please contact us. Thank you for your patience.
Henry Salt is not well know today but his work for humanitarian causes brought him praise from the likes of Mahatma Gandhi. It was Henry Salt's book A Plea for Vegetarianism that had a profound influence on Mahatma Gandhi's vegetarian beliefs. But it was Salt's book on Thoreau's, then little known writer, that was to help shape history, as Gandhi himself acknowledged the intellectual debt to Thoreau's essay on "civil disobedience" and Henry Salt in his own formulation of civil disobedience and non-violent noncooperation. Henry Salt wrote nearly 40 books most of which cogently argued and urged for some much needed humane reforms in prisons, schools, in the economic organisations of society at large, and in the treatment of animals. He was the founder of the Humanitarian League and editor of their publications.
Even some sixty years after his death, Henry Stephens Salt's writings on humanitarian causes are still of profound importance to humanitarian campaigners as many of the issues Salt wrote about are still as important today. Bloodsports continue in the U.K., his book Killing for Sport along with his other writings on fox hunting, hare coursing, stag hunting, cub hunting clearly demonstrate the sophisms used by the bloodsport apologists. His masterpiece Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress remains the best book on animal rights. Whatever humanitarian cause he chose to write about he demonstrated great wit to show the folly of those who opposed progress. His autobiographies are a fascinating and amusing record of England during his lifetime, particularly of Eton, his friends, and socialism. And of course his studies of Thoreau, Shelley and Jefferies remain among the most insightful ever written. In particular, his Life of Henry David Thoreau is regarded by many as the finest on the subject and has recently been republished in paperback.