FEATHERED WOMEN. 
213 
species. About the cruelty of killing these birds when they are engaged in incu- 
bation and rearing their young nothing need be said here. Doubtless it is very 
great, so that men who live, so to speak, in a rougher world, and are harder than 
women, are sickened at the thought of it ; but it is really a very small matter, 
scarcely worthy of mention, compared with the crime and monstrous outrage of 
deliberately exterminating species such as the snowy egrets, birds of paradise, and 
numberless others, that are being done to death. F'pr these are not of the 
commoner types, universally distributed, and mostly of modest colouring, which 
would not be greatly missed after their places, left vacant, had been occupied by 
others ; the kinds now being destroyed cannot be replaced, not in a thousand 
years, nor ever ; they are nature’s most brilliant living gems and give her greatest 
lustre. A dead and stuffed bird ma)' be an object of scientific interest to a man ; 
without the life and motion proper to it it cannot well be an object of beauty ; 
but if it were beautiful beyond all other objects, the thought of its cost — of the 
ruthless war of destruction waged against bird life, and the irreparable loss to 
nature — would serve to make it appear ugly to the eye and hateful to look at ; and 
no man who has given any thought to the subject, who has any love of nature in 
his soul, can see a woman decorated with dead birds, or their wings, or nuptial 
plumes, without a feeling of repugnance for the wearer, however beautiful or 
charming she may be. 
Why then do women, who have received sufficient enlightenment on this 
subject during the last few years, still refuse to give up a fashion which degrades 
them? It is Herbert Spencer’s idea that women do not progress side by side 
with men, that they lag very far behind, and intellectually, especially on the side 
of the atsthetic faculties, occupy a position about midway between the civilised 
man of our era and the pure savage. There is an illustration in this week’s 
Punch in which one of Mr. Du Maurier’s vulgar, fat, well-ilressed women i.s seen 
entering a shop, and to the obsequious shopman’s inquiry of “ What can I have 
the pleasure of serving you with, madam?” the stout lady replies, “Wings.” 
The satirist entitles his picture “A large order.” And those who adopt II. 
Spencer’s explanation wouhl regard it as an equally “large order” to ask that 
women should have the feeling for nature that men have — that they should be 
expected to sacrilice the ornament of a pair of bright wings or a spray of egret’s 
nuptial feathers merely to preserve the existence of a species of bird. On that 
large and somewhat delicate question I offer no opinion ; and some of our sisters 
may find comfort in the reflection that Herbert .Spencer is not omniscient. What 
we regard as beyond doubt is that to progress is a law of our being — that we all, 
men and women, whether abreast or men first and women far behind, are con- 
tinually advancing. A slow advance, true, but not to be doubted if we look on 
ourselves as in very truth descendants of the low-browed prognathous cannibals of 
the earlier stone ages. Holding such a doctrine, it becomes only reasonable to 
believe that the time will come when the destructive madness of the present day 
will be impossible, when a w’oman will be as much above wearing “murderous 
millinery ” as she is now, in Europe, above wearing the savage ornaments with 
which the naked red woman of Venezuela decorates herself, or the necklace of 
human ears (captured from the enemy) which a Mexican lady is said to have 
exhibited in a ballroom. But what an impoverished nature and earth future 
generations will inherit from us ! God’s footstool, yes, but with all the shining 
golden threads picked out of its embroidery. .Some knowledge will survive 
among our remote descendants of the wonderful and brilliant forms of bird life 
that are now passing away — the unimaginable beauty and grace that they would 
have known how to a|rpreciate, and with it some knowledge of how it was 
destroyed in the space of two or three decades for the gratification of a detestable 
vanity. They will, I fancy, think less kindly of their cultured, Uuskin-reading 
19th century ancestors than of those very much more distant progenitors who had 
some shocking customs but spoilt nothing. At all events, the old cannibals had 
no immeasurable past and future to exist in as we have, and no soul-growths to 
boast of, and did not sin against the light. 
\V. II. Hudson. 
