It is high time for the whole civilized world to know that many of the most beautiful and remarkable birds of the world are now being exterminated to furnish millinery ornaments for women’s wear.  The mass of new information that we have recently secured on this traffic from the headquarters of the feather trade is appalling.  Previously, I had not dreamed that conditions are half as bad as they are.

It is entirely fitting that on this subject New York should send a message to London.  New York is almost a Spotless Town in plume-free millinery, and London and Paris are the worst places in the world.  We have cleaned house.  With but extremely slight exceptions, the blood of the slaughtered innocents is no longer upon our skirts, and on the subject of plumage millinery we have a right to be just as Pharisaical as we choose.

Here in New York (and also in New Jersey) no man may sell, own for sale or offer for sale the plumage of any wild American bird other than a game bird.  More than that, the plumage of no foreign bird belonging to any bird family represented in the fauna of North America can be sold here!  There are only a few kinds of improper “millinery” feathers that it is possible to sell here under the law.  Thanks to the long and arduous campaign of the National Association of Audubon Societies, founded and for ten years directed by gallant William Dutcher, you now see on the streets of New York very, very little wild-bird plumage save that from game birds.

It is true that a few servant girls are now wearing the cast-off aigrettes of their mistresses; but they are only as one in a thousand.  At Atlantic City there is said to be a fine display of servant-girl and ladies-maid aigrettes.  In New York and New Jersey, in Pennsylvania for everything save the sale of heron and egret plumes (a privilege obtained by a bunko game), in Massachusetts, and in many other of our States, the wild-birds’-plumage millinery business is dead.  Two years ago, when the New York legislature refused to repeal the Dutcher law, the Millinery Association asserted, and brought a cloud of witnesses to Albany to prove, that the enforcement of the law would throw thousands of operatives out of employment.

[Illustration:  BEAUTIFUL AND CURIOUS BIRDS NOW BEING DESTROYED
FOR THE FEATHER TRADE—­(I)
Belted Kingfisher
Victoria Crowned Pigeon
Superb Calliste
Greater Bird of Paradise
Common Tern
Cock of the Rock]

The law is in effect; and the aigrette business is dead in this state.  Have any operatives starved, or been thrown out of employment?  We have heard of none.  They are now at work making very pretty hat ornaments of silk and ribbons, and gauze and lace; and “They are wearing them.”

[Illustration:  1600 HUMMINGBIRD SKINS AT 2 CENTS EACH!  Part of Lot Purchased by the Zoological Society at the Regular Quarterly London Millinery Feather Sale, August, 1912.]