The feather dealers have been shrewdly active in the defense of their trade, and the methods they have employed for influencing public opinion have quite outshone those put forth by their brethren in America.  I have before me a copy of a booklet bearing the name of Mr. C.F.  Downham as the author, and the London Chamber of Commerce has loaned its good name as publisher.  Altogether it is a very shrewd piece of work, even though its arguments in justification of bird slaughter for the feather market are too absurd and weak for serious consideration.

The chief burden of the defender of bird slaughter for millinery purposes is on account of the destruction of egrets and herons, but particularly the former.  To offset as far as possible the absolutely true charge that egrets bear their best plumes in their breeding season, when the helpless young are in the nest and the parent birds must be killed to obtain the plumes, the feather trade has obtained from three Frenchmen—­Leon Laglaize, Mayeul Grisol, and F. Geay—­a beautiful and plausible story to the effect that in Venezuela the enormous output of egret plumes has been obtained by picking up, off the bushes and out of the water and mud, the shed feathers of those birds! According to the story, Venezuela is full of egret farms, called “garceros,”—­where the birds breed and moult under strict supervision, and kindly drop their feathers in such places that it is possible to find them, and to pick them up, in a high state of preservation!  And we are asked to believe that it is these very Venezuelan picked-up feathers that command in London the high price of _$44 per ounce_.

[Illustration:  THE FIGHT IN ENGLAND AGAINST THE USE OF WILD BIRD’S PLUMAGE IN THE MILLINERY TRADE Sandwich-men Employed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, that Patroled London Streets in July, 1911.]

Mr. Laglaize is especially exploited by Mr. Downham, as a French traveler of high standing, and well known in the zoological museums of France; but, sad to say, when Prof.  Henry Fairfield Osborn cabled to the Museum of Natural History in Paris, inquiring about Mr. Laglaize, the cable flashed back the one sad word; “Inconnu!” (Unknown!)

I think it entirely possible that enough shed feathers have been picked up in the reeking swamps of Venezuela, on the upper tributaries of the Orinoco, to afford an excuse for the beautiful story of Mr. Laglaize.  Any shrewd individual with money, and the influence that money secures, could put up just such a “plant” as I firmly believe has been put up by some one in Venezuela.  I will guarantee that I could accomplish such a job in Venezuela or Brazil, in four months’ time, at an expense not exceeding one thousand dollars.

That the great supply of immaculately perfect egret plumes that annually come out of Venezuela could by any possibility be picked up in the swamps where they were shed and dropped by the egrets, is entirely preposterous and incredible.  The whole proportion is denounced by several men of standing and experience, none of whom are “inconnu.”