But even while these words are being written, there is one large fly in the ointment.  The store-window of E. &.  S. Meyers, 688 Broadway, New York, contains about six hundred plumes and skins of birds of paradise for sale for millinery purposes.  No wonder the great bird of paradise is now almost extinct!  Their sale here is possible because the Dutcher law protects from the feather dealers only the birds that belong to avian families represented in the United States.  With fiendish cunning and enterprise, the shameless feather dealers are ferreting out the birds whose skins and plumes may legally be imported into this country and sold; but we will meet that with a law that will protect all foreign birds, so far as we are concerned.  Now it is time for the universal enactment of a law which will prohibit the sale and use as ornaments of the plumage, feathers or skins of any wild bird that is not a legitimate game bird.

London is now the head of the giant octopus of the “feather trade” that has reached out its deadly tentacles into the most remote wildernesses of the earth, and steadily is drawing in the “skins” and “plumes” and “quills” of the most beautiful and most interesting unprotected birds of the world.  The extent of this cold-blooded industry, supported by vain and hard-hearted women, will presently be shown in detail.  Paris is the great manufacturing center of feather trimming and ornaments, and the French people obstinately refuse to protect the birds from extermination, because their slaughter affords employment to a certain numbers of French factory operatives.

All over the world where they have real estate possessions, the men of England know how to protect game from extermination.  The English are good at protecting game—­when they decide to set about it.

Why should London be the Mecca of the feather-killers of the world?

It is easily explained: 

(1) London has the greatest feather market in the world; (2) the feather industry “wants the money”; and (3) the London feather industry is willing to spend money in fighting to retain its strangle-hold on the unprotected birds of the world.

Let us run through a small portion of the mass of fresh evidence before us.  It will be easier for the friends of birds to read these details here than to procure them at first hand, as we have done.

The first thing that strikes one is the fact that the feather-hunters are scattered all over the world where bird life is plentiful and there are no laws to hinder their work.  I commend to every friend of birds this list of the species whose plumage is to-day being bought and sold in large quantities every year in London.  To the birds of the world this list is of deadly import, for it spells extermination.