Henry Stephens Salt | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt (1851-09-20)20 September 1851 |
| Died | 19 April 1939(1939-04-19) (aged 87) Brighton, England |
| Citizenship | British |
| Education | |
| Occupations |
|
| Known for |
|
| Notable work | Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892) |
| Spouses | |
| Relatives |
|
| Signature | |
 | |
Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt (/sɔːlt,sɒlt/; 20 September 1851 – 19 April 1939) was a British writer and social reformer. He campaigned for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions, and the treatment of animals. He was a noted ethicalvegetarian,anti-vivisectionist,socialist, andpacifist, and was well known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar andnaturalist. It was Salt who introducedMohandas Gandhi to the works ofHenry David Thoreau, and influenced Gandhi'sstudy of vegetarianism.[1][2] Salt is considered, by some, to be the "father of animal rights",[3] having been one of the first writers to argue explicitly in favour ofanimal rights, rather than just improvements toanimal welfare, in his bookAnimals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892).
Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt was born inNaini Tal,British India, on 20 September 1851. He was the son of a British Army colonel. In 1852, while he was still an infant, Salt moved with his family to England. He was aKing's Scholar atEton College and later studied the classicaltripos atKing's College, Cambridge, winning theBrowne Medal in 1874 (for Greekepigrams), and graduating with a first-class degree in 1875.[4]
After Cambridge, Salt returned to Eton as an assistant schoolmaster to teachclassics. Four years later, in 1879, he married the scholar Catherine (Kate) Leigh Joynes, the daughter of a fellow master at Eton.[4] He remained at Eton until 1884, when, inspired by classic ideals and disgusted by his fellow masters' meat-eating habits and reliance on servants, he and Kate moved to a small cottage atTilford, Surrey, where they grew their own vegetables and lived very simply, sustained by a small pension Salt had built up. Salt engrossed himself in writing and began work on the pioneeringHumanitarian League.[5]
During his lifetime Salt wrote almost 40 books.[6] His first,A Plea for Vegetarianism (1886) was published by theVegetarian Society, and in 1890, he produced an acclaimed biography of philosopherHenry David Thoreau, two interests that later led to a friendship withMahatma Gandhi. He also wrote, inOn Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills (1922), about the need fornature conservation to protect the natural beauty of the British countryside from commercial vandalism.[citation needed]
His circle of friends included many notable figures from late-19th and early-20th century literary and political life, including writersAlgernon Charles Swinburne,John Galsworthy,James Leigh Joynes (brother-in-law),Edward Carpenter,Thomas Hardy,Rudyard Kipling,Havelock Ellis, CountLeo Tolstoy,William Morris,Arnold Hills,Ralph Hodgson,Peter Kropotkin,Ouida,J. Howard Moore,Ernest Bell,George Bernard Shaw andRobert Cunninghame-Graham, as well as Labour leaderJames Keir Hardie andFabian Society co-foundersHubert Bland andAnnie Besant.[7][8]
Salt's shift toward vegetarianism developed alongside his evolving social, political, and religious views, significantly influenced byShelley, whom he regarded as a key mentor. Howard Williams'The Ethics of Diet praised by Salt for its humane diet advocacy, also played a role in shaping his views. Salt's vegetarianism was ultimately based on a deep moral conviction. He saw that meat, commonly regarded as food, was actually the flesh of animals slaughtered under harsh conditions. This understanding prompted him to scrutinise the ethical foundations of civilisation, which he viewed as concealing a fundamental barbarism and violence. He identified this underlying brutality in both humanity's treatment of other species and in political, economic, and social relationships, as demonstrated by war, imperialism, and the social injustices resulting from a competitive capitalist system.[9]
Salt's commitment to vegetarianism deepened over time. In 1885, he was named a vice-president of theVegetarian Society. The following year, he publishedA Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays, an anthology emphasising his rational approach to vegetarian advocacy over emotional or polemical arguments. Salt argued that vegetarianism was not merely a dietary choice but a critical component of a broader social reform movement aimed at creating a more humane, just, and civil society, which he termed "humanitarianism".[10]
Notably, Salt's writings influenced Gandhi to transition from a religiously motivated vegetarianism to an explicitly ethical one. After encountering Salt'sPlea for Vegetarianism in a London vegetarian restaurant, Gandhi read it thoroughly and was profoundly impressed. He chose to become a vegetarian by choice, dedicating himself to promoting the diet. Gandhi supported the British vegetarian movement and shared a platform with Salt at a 1931 London Vegetarian Society meeting, where he delivered a speech titled "The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism" explaining his dietary principles.[9]
In 1891, Salt co-founded the Humanitarian League, which aimed to promote humaneness and advocate for social and legal reforms. The League's philosophy was rooted in the belief that scientific advances andevolutionary biology had debunked long-held notions of differences between races, classes, and species, advocating for universal sympathy. The League, aligned with early organisedhumanism, included prominent figures likeHoward Williams,Alice Drakoules,Edward Maitland, andKenneth Romanes. It established an office in London in 1895, launched the journalHumanity, and hosted the first National Humanitarian Conference. From 1897 to 1919, headquartered atChancery Lane, the League actively campaigned againstcorporal punishment,blood sports, and other societal injustices through press engagements and public debates. After Salt stepped down in 1919, the League dissolved, and in 1924, former members founded theLeague Against Cruel Sports.[11]
In Salt's essay "A Good Taste in Diet", published inA Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays (1886), he states:[12]
Can any thoughtful man, in the face of such horrors, deliberately choose to be a flesh-eater? Must he not rather turn with relief to a vegetarian diet, with which alone can exist that widely sympathetic intellectual gentleness which recognises the rights, not of man only, but of all the animal creation.
Keith Tester writes that, in 1892, Salt created an "epistemological break", by being the first writer to consider the issue ofanimal rights explicitly, as opposed to betteranimal welfare.[13] InAnimals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress, Salt wrote that he wanted to "set the principle of animals' rights on a consistent and intelligible footing, [and] to show that this principle underlies the various efforts of humanitarian reformers ...":[14]
Even the leading advocates of animal rights seem to have shrunk from basing their claim on the only argument which can ultimately be held to be a really sufficient one—the assertion that animals, as well as men, though, of course, to a far less extent than men, are possessed of a distinctive individuality, and, therefore, are in justice entitled to live their lives with a due measure of that 'restricted freedom' to whichHerbert Spencer alludes.
He wrote that there is no point in claiming rights for animals if we subordinate their rights to human interests, and he argued against the presumption that a human life necessarily has more value than a nonhuman one:[14]
[The] notion of the life of an animal having 'no moral purpose,' belongs to a class of ideas which cannot possibly be accepted by the advanced humanitarian thought of the present day—it is a purely arbitrary assumption, at variance with our best instincts, at variance with our best science, and absolutely fatal (if the subject be clearly thought out) to any full realization of animals' rights. If we are ever going to do justice to the lower races, we must get rid of the antiquated notion of a 'great gulf' fixed between them and mankind, and must recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood.
Salt's first wife died in 1919; following this, he closed down the Humanitarian League.[15] Salt married Catherine Mandeville on 25 March 1927.[4][16] In 1935, he publishedThe Creed of Kinship, in which he critiqued established religions and laid out his own philosophy which he called "The Creed of Kinship"; it demanded the recognition of an evolutionary and biological affinity between humans and other animals.[17]
In 1933, Salt suffered a stroke.[18] He died six years later atBrighton Municipal Hospital, on 19 April 1939, aged 87;[4] his remains were cremated atBrighton Crematorium.[18]
The first biography of Salt, entitledSalt and His Circle, was published byStephen Winsten, with a preface by George Bernard Shaw, in 1951.[19] A second biography,Humanitarian Reformer and Man of Letters, was published by George Hendrick, in 1977.[19]
Salt'sAnimals' Rights was reissued in 1980; in the preface, philosopherPeter Singer described the work as the best book of the 18th- and 19th-centuries on animal rights and praised how Salt anticipated many of the issues in the contemporary animal rights debate.[20]
The Henry S. Salt Society was formed with the intention to celebrate the life and works of Salt. Its website provides information on Salt's life and on his friends and fellow activists.[21]
Media from Commons
Quotations from Wikiquote
Texts from Wikisource
| Presidents |
| ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vice-Presidents |
| ||||
| Staff |
| ||||
| Publications |
| ||||
| Related groups | |||||
