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Salt was General Secretary, Editor and founder of the League and the League's Journal from 1891 to 1920. He received considerable support from friends and supporters until it closed in 1920. The League was opposed to all avoidable suffering on any sentient being. Salt worked with the RSPCA and other organisations, and made systematic and consistent protests against numerous "barbarisms". His 'battles' in the Lords and House of Commons are recorded in the League's journal. Not all of his support came from the 'Left'. The Hon. Fitzroy Stewart, Secretary, Conservative Office, supported him on the question of stag-hunting, and is but one of many examples.Henry Salt founded the Humanitarian League (1894-1920) and with the help of like minded people campaigned on a whole range of issues.
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AIMS AND OBJECTS OF THE HUMANITARIAN LEAGUE
The Humanitarian League has been established to enforce the principle that it is iniquitous to inflict avoidable suffering on any sentient being. This principle the League will apply and emphasise in those cases where it appears to be most flagrantly overlooked, and will protest not only against the cruelties inflicted by men on men, in the name of law, authority, and conventional usage but also, in accordance with the same sentiment of humanity against the wanton ill-treatment of the lower animals. Among the reforms advocated by the Humanitarian League the following are prominent, and are dealt with by two special sub-committees:- A thorough revision and more humane administration of the Criminal Law and Prison system, with a view to the discontinuance of the death penalty and corporal punishment, and an acceptance of the principle of reclamation instead of revenge in the treatment of offenders. A more vigorous application of the existing laws for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and an extension of these laws for the protection of wild animals as well as domestic, with especial reference to blood-sports, vivisection, the slaughter of animals for food, and the cruelties inflicted, at the dictates of fashion, in the name of fur and feather trade. Recognition of the urgent need of humaner education, to impress on the young the duty of thoughtfulness and fellow feeling for all sentient beings. In brief, the distinctive purpose of the Humanitarian League is to consolidate and give consistent expression to the principle of humaneness, and to show that Humanitarianism is not merely a kindly sentiment, a product of the heart rather than of the brain, but an essential portion of any intelligible system of ethics or social science. |
Among the contributors were:
John Galsworthy - The Spirit of Punishment (94KB Download, Adobe pdf format)
Colonel W L Blenkinsop Coulson (web page)
Edward Carpenter, 1844-1928
The son of an ex-naval officer who became a lawyer, Edward Carpenter was born
into a comfortable, upper middle-class family. He became a lecturer at Trinity
Hall, Cambridge in 1868 and was then elected to a clerical fellowship and ordained
as a deacon. Influenced by the American poet Walt Whitman, however, he experienced
a spiritual and intellectual crisis in the 1870s which led him to become a socialist.
His writings, in particular 'Towards Democracy' and 'Love's Coming of Age',
influenced a whole generation of socialist pioneers in the 1880s and 1890s.
Carpenter advocated a simpler, 'new life', which could be lived within the shell
of the old society. In 1883 he moved into a cottage at Millthorpe, near Sheffield,
which became a meeting place for socialists who believed that socialism meant
a transformation of all human relationships which would be founded on love,
beauty and justice. Women were particularly attracted by his feminist views,
his sexual radicalism and his emphasis on the need for a change in the relations
between men and women. A practising homosexual, Carpenter explored the complexity
of sexual desire in his poetry. He was also a penal reformer, a vegetarian and
a leading member of the Humanitarian League.
One of the best Edward
Carpenter web sites