ut the audiences do not know that
Barney was trained with a spiked saddle, and that for months life was
one long agony of pain.

Is my anger due to the cruelty I am repressing in myself? I don't care
whether it is sadism or the spark of the divine in me. All I care
about is that this inferno of pain must cease.

Never has any book affected me as this one has done. By word of mouth
and by my pen I shall try my hardest to send dear old Jack London's
message round the world. Public opinion is the only thing that can
stop the misery of these broken creatures, and I suggest that the
anti-vivisectionists turn their energies to this infinitely worse evil.
The vivisectionists, at any rate, are working for humanity, but the
brutes who break performing animals are merely amusing crowds of good
people who know nothing about what goes on behind the scenes.

* * * * *

I see in the newspaper that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks held up
the traffic in Piccadilly. They appeared on a balcony at the Ritz, and
the crowd went frantic. The super-hero and the super-heroine of the
cinema drew the crowd's emotion to them, and Tagore the Indian poet
arrived in town at the same time unnoticed. It would seem that the
crowd responds to the presence of the unimportant person only. London
went mad over Hawker and Jack Johnson, and Georges Carpentier; and if
Charlie Chaplin were to come over, I fancy London would take a general
holiday.

No one will contend that these people are of supreme importance in the
scheme of life. Charlie is a funny little man; Douglas Fairbanks is a
fine lump of a fellow; Mary Pickford is a sweet little woman. But
Tagore will live longer; Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell,
Sigmund Freud are of greater moment to humanity, yet each could walk
out of Paddington Station and be unrecognised by the crowd.

The morning paper shows well that the crowd is interested only in
unessentials. "Punish the profiteers!" was the press cry a few months
ago. Well, they punished the profiteers . . . and prices continued to
rise. A few years ago the cry was: "Flog the white slave traffickers!"
They flogged them, and yet I still see thousands of white slaves in the
West End of London. And while Europe is sinking into anarchy and
bankruptcy to-day, the only remedies the crowd representatives--the
press--can think of are remedies of the Hang-the-Kaiser type. I
believe that the crowd st