Time to End It.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 9, 27 February 1902, Page 1

Time to End It.

A cable message from London in Saturday's daily papers ran as follows : ' The King and Queen, when informed that a certain milliner had contracted for 10,000 seagulls' wings to fill

her London and Paris orders, strongly deprecated the practice of killing birds for providing the ornamentation of ladies' hats.'

When royal leaders of fashion ' strongly deprecate ' some feminine folly in the matter of personal attire, they have, no doubt, done something calculated to check the abuse. But something stronger than this is required to put a stop to the needless and wholesale slaughter of birds for the gratification of a passing craze of fashion. The matter is one that might legitimately be made the subject of legislation. In early New England the Puritans regulated fashions by a number of laws that erred greatly on the side of severity. They (says a Protestant historian) 'christened their children by Old Testament names. They regulated female attire by law. They considered long hair unscriptural, and preached against wigs and veils.' But circumstances occasionally arise which call for the existence of a sort of censor who shall have the power to say to Dame Fashion, 'governor of this world ':,' Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.' Fashion has been a Baiazet, a Tamerlane, a Zenghis Khan — all rolled into one — for our feathered friends. The wholesale carnage of useful or harmless birds for feminine hats, bonnets, and toques threatens to deprive the farmer and gardener of one of their best insect destroyers, the seashore of its zealous scavengers, the world of one of its charms, the forest of its living color, and to leave the thickets as voiceless as net and snare and shot-gun have made them in the Pyrenees. Ladies are content with artificial barley ears, poppies, ' daffy-down-dillies,' and other vegetables in their head-dress. It passes our unillumined masculine comprehension that they should not be equally happy with counterfeit presentments of swallows, kingfishers, magpies, mountain thrushes, and blue jays, or of the wings, heads, or other disjecta membra thereof.

A return issued some four years ago by the Congress of American Ornithologists gives some idea of the enormous proportions of the destruction of birds for purposes of personal adornment. England alone imported then about 25,000,000 ' dead birds ' a year; Europe about 300,000,000. One London firm was credited with receiving annually 400,000 humming birds, 6000 birds of paradise, and 500,000 of other kinds. Another English house is said to have imported in four months of the year 1897 as many as 800,000 birds of various species from the West Indies and Brazil. These are mere sample figures, but they indicate broadly the volume of the trade in slaughtered innocents. The cable message published in Saturday's papers seems like evidence that the barbarous traffic has by no means abated, and that, in this particular instance, fashion is more constant as well as more cruel than usual. Lovely woman and her wardrobe are responsible for the approaching extinction of egrets, birds of paradise, and others of the most beautiful of the feathered tenants of our forests. Some one has said : •We may smile at fashion, and even admire her, so long as she is not cruel ; but beauty grows barbarous instead of angelic when it forgets to be kind and womanly.' We make merry at over Catullus writing a poem to soothe the giief of his pagan ladyelove for the loss of her pet sparrow. But the pagan lassie had at least heart enough to regret the death of a feathered friend.