42 



Bird Notes and News 



Saturday Review, the Spectator, the 

 Nation, the Daily Chronicle, Daily 

 News, Daily Mail, Daily Citizen, Globe, 

 Westminster Gazette, and Pall Mall 

 Gazette, but papers as widely apart as 

 the Inquirer and the Sporting and 

 Dramatic News, the Methodist Times, 

 Nature, and the Referee, the Queen and 

 Reynolds's Newspaper, together with the 

 great provincial dailies like the Dundee 

 Advertiser, the Liverpool Courier, the 

 Western Daily Press, the East Anglian 

 Daily Times, the Nottingham Guardian 

 — to name but a few — have been 

 absolutely at one in commending the 

 Bill and urging " no delay." Their 

 editorials have been accompanied or 

 followed by letters from readers in a 

 way w r hich indicated how extensive was 

 the sympathy they evoked. 



The long period covered by the 

 Parliamentary discussion — practically 

 the whole period of the session — has 

 had also another result — it has demon- 

 strated, for the benefit of Ministers, 

 the House, and the world at large 

 what are the arguments, the demands, 

 the tactics, the sincerity, of the Trade 

 party. The Government from the first 

 promised, and gave, every possible con- 

 sideration to the opponents of the 

 measure, numerically negligible though 

 they were. In spite of the proportion of 

 17 to 1 of Ayes and Noes for the Second 

 Reading, they were equally represented 

 in the Members placed on the Grand 

 Committee for the consideration of the 

 Bill. The egregious manner in which, 

 pushing this advantage to the farthest 

 limits, the Noes sought to delay dis- 

 cussion and to fritter away time in 

 worthless trifling with the same object, 

 was dealt with in the Summer Number 

 of Bird Notes and News. When after 

 twelve sittings the committee stage at 



last closed, Mr. Hobhouse still made 

 every attempt to meet the irreconcil- 

 ables, by such concessions as would 

 have made the Bill a useful measure 

 still, but only the first step to that 

 which is required. Those who knew 

 the Trade from having been intimate 

 with its tergiversations and evasions for 

 the past twenty years, guessed pretty 

 well what must be the end of such 

 attempts. The Trade party, big with 

 inflated schemes and bubble proposi- 

 tions, would accept no conditions that 

 would in any real sense affect the traffic. 

 They would propose regulations which 

 obviously could not be carried out, 

 and dictate terms that would leave them 

 laughing in their sleeves over a dust- 

 blinded public. They would offer to 

 do without birds they could not pro- 

 cure or did not want, and to give the 

 aegis of their precious protection to 

 a species here and a species there, as 

 though their native hunters were expert 

 collectors of the highest ornithological 

 knowledge and the surest honour ; but 

 the bulk of the world's birds must be 

 left to their mercy and their greed. 



Their manoeuvres for delay, delay, 

 and yet again delay, have been crowned 

 by the German Emperor. It may be 

 trusted that the appalling war upon 

 man will at least shut down the plume- 

 market and lead even the most frivolous 

 of women to understand that the day 

 for twenty-guinea aigrettes and flaunt- 

 ing paradise-plumes is not now. It 

 is also to be trusted that the utter 

 futility of discussing terms and offering 

 concessions to a party which has no 

 honest intention of abating one jot 

 of its trade or one tittle of its profits, 

 has been sufficiently proved to expedite 

 the passing of a comprehensive measure 

 next year. 



