ly slain wild birds,
mothers with young in the nest, to decorate our gentlewomen.

Probably ninety-nine readers out of a hundred will sympathise with Mr
Galsworthy's bitter cry against a Parliament that has so long left
these and other wrongs unrighted. Let Mr Galsworthy take any one of
his cases of inhumanity by itself, and he is sure of the support of
nearly all decent people in demanding that an end shall be put to it.
The human conscience has developed considerably in recent years in
regard to the treatment both of human beings and of animals, and,
though conscience is frequently dumb in the impressive presence of
economic interests, it has still the power to get things done, as
witness, for example, the establishment of minimum-wage boards in
certain sweated trades. Mr Galsworthy, however, does not ask you to
consider each of his desired reforms on its merits. He asks you, in
effect, to put them in place of the reforms which politicians are at
present discussing. "Almost any one of them," he declares of his brood
of evils, "is productive of more suffering to innocent and helpless
creatures, human or not, and probably of more secret harm to our
spiritual life, more damage to human nature, than, for example, the
admission or rejection of Tariff Reform, the Disestablishment or
preservation of the Welsh Church, I would almost say than the granting
or non-granting of Home Rule."

It seems to me that Mr Galsworthy is doing his cause, or causes, no
service in making comparisons of this sort. He is like a man who
would go before Parliament, when it was discussing some big project
like the nationalisation of the railways and deny its right to
legislate on such a matter till it had passed a measure forbidding the
sticky sort of fly-papers. One might sympathise heartily with his
desire to abolish the slow torture of flies, and I for one detest with
my whole soul those filthy fly-traps in which the insects go dragging
their legs out till they die. But it is obvious that the question of
cruelty to flies is one which must be dealt with on its merits. To
weigh it in the balance against such a thing as nationalisation of the
railways is merely to invite a humorous rather than a serious
treatment of the question. It is not a comic question in itself: it
may easily become comic as a result of some ridiculous comparison.
That is, more or less, what one feels in regard to Mr Galsworthy's
implied comparison between the importanc