318 Nature's Militia 



kept them under, measures were taken to check the 

 persecution. 



To some extent birds are now protected in Europe ; 

 but we do not seem to have learnt our lesson even yet, 

 for a cry that the birds are being exterminated is now 

 making itself heard in Asia, Africa, and America. The 

 war carried on against them in India, is already having 

 very serious results ; the swamps and marshes of 

 Florida are being depopulated ; Guinea is being de- 

 spoiled of its birds of paradise, and birds of bright 

 plumage are becoming more and more rare everywhere 

 all over the world. 



And why all this slaughter? Not because there is a 

 famine in the land, and the birds are needed for food ; 

 not even for the sake of ' sport ' ; but because the 

 fashionable ladies of Paris, London, and Vienna re- 

 quire the sacrifice of at least thirty million birds every 

 year, that they may decorate themselves with feathers. 



In India, which furnishes hundreds of thousands of 

 skins every year, insect life is rampant beyond any- 

 thing that we have experience of, and is * only kept 

 within bounds by the utmost effort of all the checks 

 provided by nature.' The ' patient, unpaid labour of 

 the useful small birds ' is the one only remedy for the 

 insect epidemics to which the empire is liable, and it 

 is sheer madness to allow them to be killed off. 



We must hope that the 'Indian Wild Birds' Protec- 

 tion Act ' will at least check the slaughter, for, if it be 

 allowed to go on, it can have but one result, and the 

 birds will be avenged here, as they have already been 

 in Europe. When once they are gone, no artificial 

 substitutes can by any possibility make up for them. 

 One may syringe the fruit-trees, cover the gooseberry- 



