A Sheaf

This volume is but a garnering of non-creative writings; mostly pleas of some sort or other—wild oats of a novelist, which he has been asked to bind up. He cannot say that he had any wanton pleasure in sowing any of them; and lest there be others of the same opinion as the anonymous gentleman who thus joyously addressed him last July: “But there—I suppose you are getting a bit out of it. Men of your calibre will do anything for filthy lucre—you old and cunning reptile!”—he mentions that he has not, personally, profited a penny by anything in this volume, and that the future proceeds therefrom will be given to St. Dunstan’s, and the National Institute for the Blind, London.

In these days of manifold human misery, many will be impatient reading some of the pleas written before the war; but the war will not last for ever, and in the peace that follows life will be rougher, the need for those pleas even more insistent than it was.

The writings have been pruned a little, and a few have not yet met the public eye.

To the many Editors of Journals and Reviews wherein the others have appeared—cordial thanks.

J. G.

August, 1916.

CONTENTS

PAGE MUCH CRY—LITTLE WOOL

ON THE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS 3 CONCERNING LAWS 77 ON PRISONS AND PUNISHMENT 95 ON THE POSITION OF WOMEN 130 ON SOCIAL UNREST 148 ON PEACE 160

THE WAR

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW 169 CREDO 169 FRANCE 171 REVEILLE 173 FIRST THOUGHTS ON THIS WAR 175 THE HOPE OF LASTING PEACE 188 DIAGNOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 194 OUR LITERATURE AND THE WAR 204 ART AND THE WAR 210 TRE CIME DI LAVAREDO 219 SECOND THOUGHTS ON THIS WAR 223 TOTALLY DISABLED 243 CARTOON 247 HARVEST 249

AND—AFTER?

PRELUDE 255 FREEDOM AND PRIVILEGE 260 THE NATION AND TRAINING 266 HEALTH, HUMANITY, AND PROCEDURE 276 A LAST WORD 283 THE ISLANDS OF THE BLESSED 289

MUCH CRY—LITTLE WOOL

ON THE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS

I

FOR LOVE OF BEASTS (A Paper in the Pall Mall Gazette, 1912.)

§ 1.

We had left my rooms, and were walking briskly down the street towards the river, when my friend stopped before the window of a small shop and said:

“Gold-fish!”

I[1] looked at him very doubtfully; one had known him so long that one never looked at him in any other way.

“Can you imagine,” he went on, “how any sane person can find pleasure in the sight of those swift things swimming for ever and ever in a bowl about twice the length of their own tails?”

“No,” I said, “I cannot—though, of course, they’re very pretty.”

“That is, no doubt, the reason why they are kept in misery.”

Again I looked at him; there is nothing in the world I distrust so much as irony.

“People don’t think about these things,” I said.