 | |
 Manifesto of the Humanitarian League | |
| Formation | 1891 |
|---|---|
| Founders | Henry S. Salt, Edward Maitland, Ernest Bell, Howard Williams, Kenneth Romanes and Alice Lewis |
| Dissolved | December 1919 |
| Purpose | Promotion of humanitarianism and animal rights |
| Location |
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The Humanitarian League was a British radical advocacy group formed by Henry S. Salt and others to promote the principle that it is wrong to inflict avoidable suffering on any sentient being. It was based in London and operated between 1891 and 1919. [1]
Howard Williams, the author of The Ethics of Diet (1883), a history of vegetarianism, proposed in the book the concept of a "humane society with a wider scope than any previously existing body". [1] William's idea was developed by fellow writer and advocate, Henry S. Salt, in an 1889 article on humanitarianism. [2]
The Humanitarian League was formed by Henry S. Salt, who was also the General Secretary and Editor. Other founding members included Edward Maitland, Ernest Bell (Chairman), [3] Howard Williams, Kenneth Romanes and Alice Lewis (Treasurer). [4] The League's inaugural meeting, in 1891, was held at the house of Alice Lewis, 14 Park Square, London, [4] who remained Treasurer for the League's existence. [1] Many of its founders were also members of the Shelley Society. [5]
Its aim was to enforce the principle that it is iniquitous to inflict avoidable suffering on any sentient being; their manifesto stated: [6]
The Humanitarian League has been established on the basis of an intelligible and consistent principle of humaneness – that it is iniquitous to inflict suffering, directly or indirectly, on any sentient being, except when self-defence or absolute necessity can justly be pleaded.
The League was a pioneering advocate for both animal and human rights, opposing corporal and capital punishment. Its goals included banning hunting as a sport and opposing vivisection, aligning it with the modern animal rights movement. [1] Many members were vegetarians. [5] The League also advanced human rights, playing a key role in the 1906 ban on flogging in the Royal Navy and campaigning to amend laws on imprisonment for debt and non-criminal offenses. [7] It also opposed compulsory vaccination. [8]
In 1895, the League opened an office in Great Queen Street, London, and launched its journal, Humanity (later The Humanitarian). That year saw the first National Humanitarian Conference with lectures on various perspectives. From 1897, the League's headquarters on Chancery Lane actively engaged with the press and organised public debates. They established departments focused on criminal law and prison reform, sports, humane diet and dress, and education reform. The League, committed to action, championed causes such as abolishing corporal punishment, blood sports, punishments for vagrancy, imprisonment for debt, "crimes of conscience", and other "barbarisms of the age". [9]
The League spread its ideas through two journals, Humanity (1895–1902), which was later renamed The Humanitarian (1902–1919) and a quarterly The Humane Review (1900–1910). [10]
During the First World War, the League's membership and output of publications were reduced in number. [1]
The League closed down in 1919, [11] following the death of Salt's wife. [12]
In 1924, former members of the League, Henry Brown Amos and Ernest Bell, established the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports, now known as the League Against Cruel Sports. [9]
In 2013, The Humanitarian League was registered as an organisation in Hong Kong. [13] It operates alongside the Ernest Bell Library, republishing historical humanitarian pamphlets and books. [14]
Notable members and supporters of the League included Annie Besant, W. H. Hudson, Sydney Olivier, George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, [4] Colonel William Lisle Blenkinsopp Coulson, [15] John Galsworthy, [16] Leo Tolstoy, J. Howard Moore, Ralph Waldo Trine, Ernest Howard Crosby, Alice Park, Clarence Darrow, [5] Keir Hardie, Thomas Hardy, Bertram Lloyd, [17] Edith Carrington, [18] Christabel Pankhurst, Tom Mann, Enid Stacy, [19] Carl Heath, Thomas Baty, George Ives, John Dillon, Lizzy Lind af Hageby, Stella Browne, Charlotte Despard, Isabella Ford, Anne Cobden-Sanderson, Michael Davitt, Alfred Russel Wallace, G. W. Foote, Conrad Noel, John Page Hopps, Sigmund Freud, [20] Josiah Oldfield, [21] Jessey Wade (Honorary Secretary of the Children’s Department; 1906–1919), [22] Henry John Williams (Humane Diet department) [23] and Henry B. Amos. [24]
Humanitarianism is an ideology centered on the value of human life, whereby humans practice benevolent treatment and provide assistance to other humans to reduce suffering and improve the conditions of humanity for moral, altruistic, and emotional reasons.
Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt was an English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions, and the treatment of animals. He was a noted ethical vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, socialist, and pacifist, and was well known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist. It was Salt who first introduced Mohandas Gandhi to the influential works of Henry David Thoreau, and influenced Gandhi's study of vegetarianism. Salt is considered, by some, to be the "father of animal rights", having been one of the first writers to argue explicitly in favour of animal rights, rather than just improvements to animal welfare, in his Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892).
Ernest Howard Crosby was an American reformer, georgist, and author.
George Cecil Ives was an English poet, writer, penal reformer and early homosexual law reform campaigner.
Howard Williams was an English humanitarianism and vegetarianism activist, historian, and writer. He was noted for authoring The Ethics of Diet, a history of vegetarianism, which was influential on the Victorian vegetarian movement.
Carl Heath (1869–1950) was a leader of the Quaker movement in Britain and a penal reformer. He was the secretary of the National Peace Council during the First World War when he conceived the idea of Quaker embassies to establish an international Quaker organisation. He was a member of the Humanitarian League and secretary of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment.
Alice Marie Drakoules was a Belgium-born British humanitarian, vegetarian and campaigner for animal welfare. She was a notable organiser and supporter of humanitarian and animal organisations, including the Humanitarian League, Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society and the League Against Cruel Sports.
Ernest Bell was an English publisher, writer and activist. He was an advocate for animal rights and welfare, vegetarianism, and humanitarian causes.
Edith Carrington (1853–1929) was an English animal rights activist and promoter of vegetarianism. She was for sometime an artist, but began to write books on animals from Carrington. She was a vocal opponent of Eleanor Anne Ormerod's campaign seeking the extermination of the house sparrow and was an anti-vivisectionist.
John Howard Moore was an American zoologist, philosopher, educator, humanitarian and socialist. He is considered to be an early, yet neglected, proponent of animal rights and ethical vegetarianism, and was a leading figure in the American humanitarian movement. Moore was a prolific writer, authoring numerous articles, books, essays, pamphlets on topics including animal rights, education, ethics, evolutionary biology, humanitarianism, socialism, temperance, utilitarianism and vegetarianism. He also lectured on many of these subjects and was widely regarded as a talented orator, earning the name the "silver tongue of Kansas" for his lectures on prohibition.
The Universal Kinship is a 1906 book by American zoologist, philosopher, educator and socialist J. Howard Moore. In the book, Moore advocated for a secular sentiocentric philosophy, called the Universal Kinship, which mandated the ethical consideration and treatment of all sentient beings based on Darwinian principles of shared evolutionary kinship, and a universal application of the Golden Rule; a direct challenge to anthropocentric hierarchies and ethics. The book was endorsed by Henry S. Salt, Mark Twain and Jack London, Eugene V. Debs and Mona Caird. Moore expanded on his ideas in The New Ethics, published in 1907.
Josiah Oldfield was an English lawyer, physician and promoter of his own variant of fruitarianism which was virtually indistinguishable from lacto-ovo vegetarianism. He became a versatile author, a prolific writer of popular books on dietary and health topics.
"The Meat Fetish" is a 1904 essay by Ernest Crosby on vegetarianism and animal rights. It was subsequently published as a pamphlet the following year, with an additional essay by Élisée Reclus, entitled The Meat Fetish: Two Essays on Vegetarianism.
Behind the Scenes in Slaughter-Houses is a 1892 pamphlet on animal slaughter by H. F. Lester.
Anna Jessey Wade was an English suffragette and campaigner for animal welfare. She was the founder of the Cats Protection League. Wade also co-founded a number of other animal welfare organisations and helped create and was editor of the feminist gender studies journal Urania.
Henry John Williams was an English Anglican priest and activist for humanitarianism, animal rights and vegetarianism. He was the founder of the Order of the Golden Age; an international animal rights society.
Henry Brown Amos was a Scottish activist for animal rights, vegetarianism, humanitarianism and against vivisection and hunting. He also worked for some time as a draper. Amos held a number of positions within organisations dedicated to animals and vegetarianism, and co-founded the League Against Cruel Sports in 1924.
George Bedborough Higgs was an English bookseller, journalist, writer and editor. He advocated for a number of causes, including sex reform, freethought, secularism, eugenics, animal rights, vegetarianism, and free love. He was the secretary of the Legitimation League and editor of the League's publication The Adult: A Journal for the Advancement of freedom in Sexual Relationships. Bedborough was convicted for obscenity in 1898, after being caught selling a book on homosexuality; the case of Regina v. Bedborough, has also been referred to as the Bedborough trial or Bedborough case.
The Vegetarian Federal Union (VFU) was a British vegetarianism organisation founded in 1889, which operated until 1911.
The New Ethics is a 1907 book by the American zoologist and philosopher J. Howard Moore, in which he advocates for a form of ethics, that he calls the New Ethics, which applies the principle of the Golden Rule—treat others as you would want to be treated yourself—to all sentient beings. It expands on the ideas espoused in his 1906 book, The Universal Kinship.
