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CONSIDERATION FOR BIRDS

The Publication of Frances Power Cobbe's Memoirs Calls Attention to It.
Ouida Writes on "Birds and Their Persecutors" in the Nineteenth Century -- A Sharp Criticism.

Strong Condemnation of Those Who Wilfullly Slaughter Them by the Wholesale for Sport.

In, the autobiography of Frances Power Cobbe, that ruling passion of her life, consideration for dumb animals appears and reappears constantly. "The horrors of scientific cruelty to animals" is constantly referred to by her. In speaking of Tennyson, she says:

"I shall account it one of the chief honors which have fallen to my lot that Tennyson asked leave, through his son, to pay me a visit. Needless to say, I accepted the offer with gratitude and fortunately Iw as at home, in our little house in Cheyne Walk, when he called on me. He sat for a long time over my fire, and talked of poetry; of the share melodious words ought to have in it; of the hatefulness of scientific cruelty, against which he was going to write again; and of the new and dangerous phases of thought even then apparent."

The publication of this book, which pushes this one idea constantly to the foreground, similtaneously with the appearance of Ouida's article in the Nineteenth Century, on the slaughter of birds, should show how women are rising against this needless destruction of the "little people of the air"

It has been frequently said that it was the vanity of women which above all things has caused this slaughter of the innocents. But it has not been the sanity of women any more than the stupidity of men. Men have snared the birds for the profit derived from their sale Women have thoughtlessly bought the birds, and their wings and breasts, because they saw them in the milliner's boxes, and finding them there, already dead and dressed, had no compunction about buying them. Nor have the women been any more culpable than those gourmands who have been willing to eat English larks, for which there is even in America an increasing sale It really seems that if there is any time when a person would feel absolutely bestial it is when his sensibilities have become so subordinated to his appetites, that he will be willing, like some foul creature of the primeval forest, to crunch a lark between his molars. Could any sacrilege have seemed more coarse to Keats that this gross devastation of the skylark which "shakes the tremulous dew from his lush clover covert?" As for Shelly who cried: "Bird thou never wert!" He would as soon have thought of masticating the Spirit of Song and Poesy itself as this bird, born to give the last accent of tender beauty to an English morning

Ouida turns her fine eloquence especially against the Italian Speaking of the capture of a great rare woodpecker that "sat upright and tragic as a figure of Napoleon on the Rock," she says. "He has no song' He is not edible, he will not live a week if caged; yet he is mercilessly traped and carried away from his native woods to die When I say that he is not edible I mean that he is not considered so; but to the Italian everything is edible; it is a nation without a palate It steeps a hare in fennel and eats salt with melons The craze for devouring birds of all kinds is a species of fury from the Alps to Etna, they crunch the delicate bodies between their jaws with disgusting relish and a lark only represents to them a succulent morsel for their spit or pasty. The trade in larks all over the world is enormous and execrable, and is as large in England as in Italy. It should at once be made penal by heavy fines on the trappers, the venders, and the eaters, or ere long no more will the lark be heard on earth. It is admitted by all who know anything of the subject that agriculture would be impossible without the aid of birds, as the larvae and developed insects of all kinds would make a desert of the entire area of cultivated land This is well know; yet all over the world the destruction of birds rages unchecked, and no attempt is made to protect them to interdict their public sale, and to enable them to next and rear their young in peace"