Our town and civic duty

Chapter 55: BANDS OF MERCY

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About This Book

A school reader for elementary pupils offers short stories, adapted tales, and practical lessons that introduce civic virtues such as courage, self-control, thrift, perseverance, kindness to animals, and patriotism. It then profiles public servants—police, mail carriers, firemen, street cleaners, and sanitation workers—to illustrate dependence, interdependence, and community cooperation. Subsequent sections address personal and public safety, sanitation, and insect control, and conclude with guidance on Junior Red Cross activities and patriotic service. Teacher notes recommend dramatization, discussion, and hands-on projects to connect classroom learning with daily civic habits and to encourage respect for public institutions and duties.

BANDS OF MERCY

“I will try to be kind to all living creatures, and will try to protect them from cruel usage.”

This is the simple pledge taken by the more than three million members of the many Bands of Mercy in the United States.

The object of the Band of Mercy is to awaken in the hearts of children a feeling of kindness toward everything that lives.

The members promise to do all they can to relieve the suffering around them, and to speak for the dumb animals that cannot speak for themselves.

There are no dues. The members choose their own name and elect their own officers.[A]

Mr. George T. Angell, who was a great lover of animals, formed the first American Bands of Mercy in 1882. Mr. Angell lived to be eighty-six years old, and spent almost the whole of his long life in working for the kind treatment of every living creature.