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CHAPTER XXVIII

THE BIRD PETITION

BEFORE the year 1897 I had become very much alarmed at the prospect of the total extinction of our song-birds. The Bobolink seemed to be disappearing from the fields in Massachusetts, the beautiful Summer Red Bird had become extinct, and the Oriole and the Scarlet Tanager had almost disappeared. Many varieties of song-birds which were familiar to my own boyhood were unknown to my children. The same thing seems to be going on in other countries. The famous Italian novelist, Ouida, contributed an article in the North American Review a few years ago in which she describes the extermination of the Nightingale in Italy. The Director of the Central Park, in one of his Reports, stated that within fifteen or twenty years the song-birds of the State of New York had diminished forty-five per cent.

One afternoon in the spring of 1897, Governor Claflin called on me at my Committee Room in the Capitol and told me a lady had just visited his daughter at her rooms who had on her head eleven egrets. These egrets are said to come from the female White Heron, a beautiful bird abounding in Florida. They are a sort of bridal ornament, growing out on the head of the female at pairing time and perishing and dropping off after the brood is reared. So the ornament on the horrible woman's head had cost the lives of eleven of these beautiful birds and very likely in every case the lives of a brood of young ones.

When I went home I sat down after dinner and wrote with a pencil the following petition.

"To the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:

"We, the song-birds of Massachusetts and their playfellows, make this our humble petition:

"We know more about you than you think we do. We know how good you are. We have hopped about the roofs and looked in at the windows of the houses you have built for poor and sick and hungry people and little lame and deaf and blind children. We have built our nests in the trees and sung many a song as we flew about the gardens and parks you have made so beautiful for your own children, especially your poor children, to play in.

"Every year we fly a great way over the country, keeping all the time where the sun is bright and warm; and we know that whenever you do anything, other people all over the great land between the seas and the great lakes find it out, and pretty soon will try to do the same thing. We know; we know. We are Americans just as you are. Some of us, like some of you, came from across the great sea, but most of the birds like us have lived here a long while; and birds like us welcomed your fathers when they came here many years ago. Our fathers and mothers have always done their best to please your fathers and mothers.

"Now we have a sad story to tell you. Thoughtless or bad people are trying to destroy us. They kill us because our feathers are beautiful. Even pretty and sweet girls, who we should think would be our best friends, kill our brothers and children so that they may wear plumage on their hats. Sometimes people kill us from mere wantonness. Cruel boys destroy our nests and steal our eggs and our young ones. People with guns and snares lie in wait to kill us, as if the place for a bird were not in the sky, alive, but in a shop window or under a glass case. If this goes on much longer, all your song-birds will be gone. Already, we are told, in some other countries that used to be full of birds, they are almost gone. Even the nightingales are being all killed in Italy.

"Now we humbly pray that you will stop all this, and will save us from this sad fate. You have already made a law that no one shall kill a harmless song-bird or destroy our nests or our eggs. Will you please to make another that no one shall wear our feathers, so that no one will kill us to get them? We want them all ourselves. Your pretty girls are

pretty enough without them. We are told that it is as easy for you to do it as for Blackbird to whistle.

over.

"If you will, we know how to pay you a hundred times We will teach your children to keep themselves clean and neat. We will show them how to live together in peace and love and to agree as we do in our nests. We will build pretty houses which you will like to see. We will play about your gardens and flower beds,-ourselves like flowers on wings, without any cost to you. We will destroy the wicked insects and worms that spoil your cherries and currants and plums and apples and roses. We will give you our best songs and make the spring more beautiful and the summer sweeter to you. Every June morning when you go out into the field, Oriole and Blackbird and Bobolink will fly after you and make the day more delightful to you; and when you go home tired at sundown, Vesper Sparrow will tell you how grateful we are. When you sit on your porch after dark, Fife Bird and Hermit Thrush and Wood Thrush will sing to you; and even Whip-poor-will will cheer up a little. We know where we are safe. In a little while all the birds will come to live in Massachusetts again, and everybody who loves music will like to make a summer home with you."

I thought it might, perhaps, strike the Legislature of Massachusetts and the public more impressively than a sober argument. The whole thing took only fifteen or twenty minutes. The petition was signed by all the song-birds of Massachusetts, and illustrated by Miss Ellen Day Hale with the portraits of the signers. It was presented to the Massachusetts Senate by the Honorable A. S. Roe, Senator from the Worcester District. The Legislature acted upon it and passed the following Statute:

"Whoever has in his possession the body or feathers of any bird whose taking or killing is prohibited by section four of chapter two hundred and seventy-six of the acts of the year eighteen hundred and eighty-six, or wears such feathers for the purpose of dress or ornament, shall be pun

ished as provided in said section: provided that this act shall not be construed to prohibit persons having the certificate provided for in said sections from taking or killing such birds; and provided, further, that this act shall not apply to Natural History Associations, or to the proprietors of museums, or other collections for scientific purposes.

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This Statute was copied in several other States. I think the petition helped a good deal the healthy reaction which, owing largely to the efforts of humane societies and Natural History Associations and especially of some very accomplished ladies, has arrested the destruction of these beautiful ornaments of our woods and fields and gardens, "our fellow pilgrims on the journey of life," who have so much of humanity in them and who, like us, have their appointed tasks set to them by the great Creator.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE A. P. A. CONTROVERSY

ONE very unreasonable, yet very natural excitement has stirred deeply the American people on several occasions in our history. It came to us by lawful inheritance from our English and Puritan ancestors. That is the bitter and almost superstitious dread of the Catholics, which has resulted more than once in riots and crimes, and more than once in the attempt to exclude them from political power in the country. This has sometimes taken the form of a crusade against all foreigners. But religious prejudice against the Catholics has been its chief inspiration.

I just said that this feeling, though absolutely unjustifiable, was yet quite natural, and that it came to us by lawful inheritance. I have always resisted it and denounced it to the utmost of my power. My father was a Unitarian. I was bred in that most liberal of all liberal faiths. But I have believed that the way to encounter bigotry is by liberality. If any man try to deprive you of your absolute rights, begin to defend yourself by giving him his own. Human nature, certainly American human nature, will never, in my opinion, long hold out against that method of dealing.

Our people, so far as they are of English descent, learned from their fathers the stories of Catholic persecution and of the fires of Smithfield. Fox's "Book of Martyrs," one of the few books in the Puritan libraries, was, even down to the time of my youth, reverently preserved and read in the New England farmhouses.

So it was believed that it was only the want of power that prevented the Catholics from renewing the fires of Smithfield and the terrors of the Inquisition. It was be

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