208 



Reintroductioii of Feather Millinery. 



siderable a minority of womankind, that its 

 members may be regarded as more or less 

 harmless enthusiasts, whose idiosyncracies 

 are not deservmg of consideration. 



As regards the merely sentimental aspect 

 of the question of feather millinery the 

 woman of the world holds an apparently 

 strong position. Man always has sacrificed 

 life for his daily food, and for skins for 

 warmth, comfort, convenience, luxury, and 

 display, and she sees no difference in prin- 

 ciple between the sacrifice of birds for 

 millinery and the sacrifice of other animals 

 for rugs, furs, gloves, etc. It does not oc- 

 cur to her that birds contribute so greatly 

 to man's well being by their services in 

 preying on insects and small rodents, and 

 to his enjoyment by their beauty, vivacity, 

 and song, that their annihilation would be 

 a crime against humanity, but this is pre- 

 cisely the aspect in which a great many 

 American women regard it; the aspect in 

 which there is good reason to believe the 

 women of America as a body might be 

 brought to regard it, if means were avail- 

 able for enlightening them on the subject 

 and enlisting their judgment and sym- 

 pathies in behalf of bird protection. 



Phenomenal as has been the growth of 

 the Audubon Society, its fifty thousand 

 members constitute less than one in a 

 thousand of our population; and widely 

 although we have advertised the movement, 

 the Society with its methods and aims is 

 probably not known to one in a hundred of 

 the people of the United States. We have 

 about a thousand Local Secretaries in as 

 many towns; outside those towns very few 

 people have heard of the Society, and even 

 in the large towns in which we have the 

 greatest number of members, the Society 

 is wholly unknown in many cases to the 

 great majority of the people, the Local 

 Secretary having perhaps worked almost 

 wholly among people of one religious 

 denomination; and, judging from the meas- 

 ure of success we have achieved both with 



adults and young people, there appears 

 reasonable ground to believe, that if the 

 whole country were thoroughly canvassed 

 and worked up on the subject we might 

 not perhaps get a majority in favor of bird 

 protection, but we would secure so influen- 

 tial a minority that the fashion of feather 

 millinery could not survive its opposition 

 although all Paris were enlisted in its sup 

 port. 



The machinery for such an extension of 

 the work is wanting, and while under any 

 circumstances there are fifty thousand per- 

 sons prepared to enter their protest against 

 the wanton destruction of millions of our 

 small birds, the question of the reintroduc- 

 tion of small bird adornment into this 

 country depends neither on them nor on 

 the women of America in the collective 

 sense in which the expression is ordinarily 

 used, but on a small coterie of American 

 women, numbering at most only a few hun- 

 dreds; the acknowledged social leaders in 

 our principal cities. For them the rein- 

 troduction of feather millinery in Paris 

 would afford an opportunity for a splendid 

 triumph. No American woman wants to 

 adorn herself with dead birds, excepting 

 from a desire for conformity to those 

 around her, and if the social leaders of the 

 women in America were to take the law in 

 their own hands, and decide against feather 

 millinery, the Parisian leaders of fashion, 

 shocked at their loss of influence in so im- 

 portant a province of their domain, would 

 at once seek to rehabilitate themselves by 

 reverting to a fashion which would be uni- 

 versally followed. 



The aspect of the question which con- 

 cerns us more nearly, is that the average 

 American woman is amenable to good 

 influences and that the solution of the 

 problem of bird protection rests on the 

 organization of adequate machinery to 

 force her attention to the humane and 

 economic aspects of the question and secure 

 her support. 



