On Henry Salt

Ted Altar

"If the use of flesh-meat can itself be dispensed with, how can it be argued that the pain, which is inseparable from slaughtering, can be otherwise than unnecessary also?"
[Henry Salt, 1982, from "Animal Rights: Consideration to Social Progress]
"The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice will bring with it in due course the emancipation of animals also. The two reforms are inseparably connected, and neither can be fully realized alone.
[from "Seventy Years Among Savages"]
"I cannot see how there can be any real and full recognition of Kinship as long as men continue either to cheat or to eat their fellow beings."
[from a letter to Gandhi, 1932]
Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) is probably not well-known today but he wrote nearly 40 books most of which cogently argued and urged for some much needed humane reforms in prisons, schools, in the economic organizations of society at large, and in the treatment of animals. He had a profound influence on Gandhi whom he introduced to Thoreau's writings via his own book on the then little known writer. Gandhi himself acknowledged the intellectual debt to Thoreau's essay on "civil disobedience" and Henry Salt in his own formulation of civil disobedience and non-violent non-cooperation.

Henry Salt also was visited by and influence people like George Bernard Shaw, William Morris, G. K. Chesterton, H.M. Hyndman, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Ramsay MacDonald and even Havelock Ellis.

Though well-educated and destined for a lucrative career, Henry Salt choose to live a modest and very frugal life of a reform writer. He was practicing vegetarianism since he could not stomach seeing how the individual, living animal is "warped from its natural standard" to then be at our hands "scarcely more than animated beef or mutton or pork".

Henry Salt is indeed an interesting turn-of-the-century writer whose ideas have been greatly influential and whose books are still worth reading. It is remarkable and hopeful how the ideas of a few thoughtful individuals can in the end wield such a large and progressive influence upon the world at large.

Here is poem by Henry Salt: 


                    Mr Facing Both Ways

     

     When the Huntsman claims praise for the killing of foxes,

     Which else would bring ruin to farmer and land,

     Yet so kindly imports them, preserves them, assorts them,

     There's a discrepance I'd fain understand.

     

     When the Butcher makes boast of the killing of cattle,

     That would multiply fast and the world over-run,

     Yet so carefully breeds them, rears, fattens and feeds them

     --

     Here also, methinks, a fine cobweb is spun.

     

     Hark you, then, whose profession or pastime is killing!

     To dispel your benignant illusions I'm loth;

     But be one or the other, my double-faced brother,

     Be slayer or saviour -- you cannot be both.