Seventy Years Among Savages

"Seventy Years Among Savages" by Henry S. Salt is a collection of essays about animal welfare. Some notable titles include The argument – Where ignorance was bliss – Literæ inhumaniores – The discovery – Cannibal's conscience – Glimpses of civilization – The poet-pioneer – Voices crying in the wilderness – A league of humaneness – Twentieth-century tortures – Hunnish sports and fashions – etc. Excerpt: «The seventy years spent by me among savages form the subject of this story, but not, be it noted, seventy years of consciousness that my life was so cast, for during the first part of my residence in the strange land where I was born, the dreadful reality of my surroundings was hardly suspected by me, except now and then, perhaps, in a passing glimmer of apprehension. Then, by slow degrees, incident after incident brought a gradual awakening, until at last there dawned on my mind the conviction which alone could explain and reconcile for me the many contradictions of our society—that we were not „civilized“ but „savages“—that the „dark ages,“ far from being part of a remote past, were very literally present.»