THE LADY AND THE BIRD

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 26, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 21.

THE LADY AND THE BIRD.

A million bobolinks killed last year? Four million other birds slaughtered in the same year—and for what?—That their torn and distorted bodies might be flaunted in the headgear of American womankind!

These are no guesswork figures, but the official report of the Audubon Society of Massachusetts. And what does it mean?—It means five million voices stilled in nature’s avian choir; five million flashes of cheeriness and gladness taken from human life; and millions of other young lives doomed to starvation or prey in order that the plumaged corpse of the murdered mother bird may be rent by a milliner and jammed in hideous shapelessness in milady’s hat!

Ah, milady, is there no efficacy in these desolating figures? Is there no mercy in your heart, no conscience in your make-up, no sentiment in your soul? Can you enjoy the finest opera when you think that the killing of the birds with which you and your sisters are crowning your beauty, is gradually silencing the grand oratorio of the forest and the fields?

A birdless country! a voiceless forest! what a desolation it would be! And yet that is just what this country is coming to if the song-birds of our land are to be killed off at the rate of five millions a year in order to gratify feminine vanity and keep woman “in style.”

What a gruesome, hideous, conscienceless “style” it is that murders melody and silences the lark that sings from heaven’s gate!

—Mail and Express.