ZOOPHILY.

It is a comforting reflection in a world still “full of violence and cruel habitations” that the behavior of men to domestic animals must have been, on the whole, more kind than the reverse. Had it been otherwise, the “set” of the brute’s brains, according to modern theory, would have been that of shyness and dread of us, such as is actually exhibited by the rabbit which we chase in the field and the rat we pursue in the cupboard. In countries where cats are exceptionally ill-treated (e.g., the south of France), poor puss is almost as timid as a hare; while the devotion and trustfulness of the dog toward man in every land peopled by an Aryan race seem to prove that, with all our faults, he has not found us such bad masters after all. Dogs love us, and could only love us, because we have bestowed on them some crumbs of love and good-will, though their generous little hearts have repaid the debt a thousand-fold. The “Shepherd’s Chief Mourner” and “Grey Friar’s Bobby” had probablyreceived in their time only a few pats from the horny hands of their masters, and a gruff word of approval when the sheep had been particularly cleverly folded. But they recognized that the superior being condescended to care for them, and their adoring fidelity was the ready response.[21]

Two different motives of course have influenced men to such kindness to domestic animals, one being obvious self-interest, and the necessity, if they needed the creature’s services, to keep it in some degree of health and comfort; and the other being the special affection of individual men for favorite animals. Of the frequent manifestation of this latter sentiment in all ages, literature and art bear repeated testimony. We find it in the parable of Nathan; in the pictured tame lion running beside the chariot of Rameses; in the story of Argus in theOdyssey; in the episode in theMahabharata, where the hero refuses to ascend to heaven in the car of Indra without his dog; in the exquisite passage in theZend-Avesta, where the lord of good speaks to Zoroaster, “For I have made the dog, I who amAhura Mazda”; in the history of Alexander’s hero, Bucephalus; in Pliny’s charming tales of the boy and the pet dolphin, and of the poor slave thrown down the Gemonian stairs, beside whose corpse his dog watched and wailed till even the stern hearts of the Roman populace were melted to pity.

But neither the every-day self-interested care of animals by their masters, nor the occasional genuine affection of special men to favorite animals,—which have together produced the actual tameness most of the domesticated tribes now exhibit,—seems to have led men to the acknowledgment of moral obligation on their part toward the brutes. As a lady will finger lovingly a bunch of flowers, and the next moment drop it carelessly on the roadside or pluck the blossoms to pieces in sheer thoughtlessness, so the great majority of mankind have always treated animals.

“We tread them to death, and a troop of them diesWithout our regard or concern,”

cheerfully remarkedDr.Watts concerning ants; but he might have said the same of our “unconcern”in the case of the cruel destruction of thousands of harmless birds and beasts and the starvation of their young, and of the all but universal recklessness of men in dealing with creatures not representing value in money.

It is not, however, to be reckoned as surprising that our forefathers did not dream of such a thing as duty to animals. They learned very slowly that they owed duties tomenof other races than their own. Only on the generation which recognized thoroughly for the first time (thanks in great measure to Wilberforce and Clarkson) that the negro was “a man and a brother” did it dawn that, beyond the negro, there were other still humbler claimants for benevolence and justice. Within a few years passed both the emancipation of the West Indian slaves and that first act for prevention of cruelty to animals of which Lord Erskine so truly prophesied that it would prove, “not only an honor to the Parliament of England, but an era in the civilization of the world.”

But the noble law of England—which thus forestalled the moralists and set an example which every civilized nation, with one solitary exception, has followed—remains even to this day, after sixty years, still in advance of the systematic teachers of human duty. Even while every year sermons specially inculcatinghumanity to animals are preached all over the kingdom, nobody (so far as the present writer is aware) has attempted formally to include Duty to the Lower Animals in any complete system of ethics as an organic part of the Whole Duty of Man.[22]

Without pretending for a moment to fill up this gap in ethics, I would fain offer to those who are interested in the subject a suggestion which may possibly serve as a scaffolding till the solid edifice be built by stronger hands. We must perchance yet wait to determine what are the rightactionsof man to brute; but I do not think we need lose much time in deciding what must be the rightsentiment, the general feeling wherewith it is fit we should regard the lower animals. If we can but clearly define that sentiment, it will indicate roughly the actions which will be consonant therewith.

In the first place, it seems to me that a sense of serious responsibility toward the brutes ought to replace our “lady-and-the-nosegay” condition ofinsouciance.The “ages before morality” are at an end at last, even in this remote province of human freedom. Of all the grotesque ideas which have imposed on us in the solemn phraseology of divines and moralists, none is more absurd than the doctrine that our moral obligations stop short where the object of them does not happen to know them, and assures us that, because the brutes cannot call us to account for our transgressions, nothing that we can do will constitute a transgression. To absolve us from paying for a pair of boots because our bootmaker’s ledger had unluckily been burned would be altogether a parallel lesson in morality. It is plain enough, indeed, that the creature who is (as we assume) without a conscience or moral arbitrament must always be exonerated from guilt, no matter what it may do of hurt or evil; and the judicial proceedings against, and executions of, oxen and pigs in the Middle Ages for manslaughter were unspeakably absurd. But not less absurd, on the other side, is it to exonerate men, whohaveconsciences and free will, when they are guilty of cruelty tobrutes, on the plea not thatthey, but the brutes are immoral and irresponsible.[23]

A moral being is not moral on one side of him only, but moralall round, and toward all who are above, beside, and beneath him: just as a gentleman is a gentleman not only to the king, but to the peasant; and as a truthful man speaks truth to friend and stranger. Just in the same way, the “merciful man is merciful to his beast,” as he is merciful to the beggar at his gate. I may add that every noble quality is specially tested by its exhibition in those humbler directions wherein there is nothing to be gained by showing it and nothing to be lost by contrary behavior.

There is a passage from Jeremy Bentham, quoted in Mrs. Jamieson’sCommonplace Bookand elsewhere, which will recur to many readers at this point: “The day may come,” he says, “when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. It may come one day to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of theossacrum, are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor.... The question is not, Can they reason? or Can they speak? but, Can they suffer?”

Long before Bentham, a greater mind, travelling along a nobler road of philosophy, laid down the canon which resolves the whole question. Bishop Butler affirmed that it was on the simple fact of a creature beingSENTIENT—i.e., capable of pain and pleasure—that rests our responsibility to save it pain and give it pleasure. There is no evading this obligation, then, as regards the lower animals, by the plea that they are not moral beings. It isourmorality, nottheirs, which is in question. There are special considerations which in different cases may modify our obligation, but it is on such special reasons, not on the universal non-moral nature of the brutes (as the old divines taught), that our exoneration must be founded; and the onus lies on us to show cause for each of them.

The distinction between our duties to animals and our duties to our human fellow-creatures lies here. As regards them both, we are indeed forbidden to inflict avoidable pain, because both alike are sentient. But, as regards the brutes, our dutiesstopthere: whereas, as regards men, they being moral as well as sentient beings, our primary obligations toward themmust concern their higher natures, and include the preservation of the lives which those higher natures invest with a sanctity exclusively their own. Thus, we reach the important conclusion that the infliction of avoidable pain is the supreme offence as regards the lower animals, butnotthe supreme offence as regards man. Sir Henry Taylor’s noble lines go to the very root of the question:—

“Pain, terror, mortal agonies, which scareThy heart in man, to brutes thou wilt not spare.Are theirs less sad and real?Pain in manBears the high mission of the flail and fan;In brutes, ’tis purely piteous.”

Pain is the one supreme evil of the existence of the lower animals, an evil which (so far as we can see) has no countervailing good. As to death, a painless one—so far from being the supreme evil to them—is often the truest mercy. Thus, instead of the favorite phrase of certain physiologists, that “they would put hecatombs of brutes to torture to save the smallest pain of a man,” true ethics bids us regard man’smoralwelfare only as of supreme importance, and anything which can injureit(such, for example, as the practice, or sanction of the practice, of cruelty) as the worst of evils, even if along with it should come a mitigation of bodily pain. On this subject, the present Bishop of Winchesterhas put the case in a nutshell. “It is true,” he said, “that man is superior to the beast, but the part of man which we recognize as such is his moral and spiritual nature. So far as his body and its pains are concerned, there is no particular reason for considering them more than the body and bodily pains of a brute.”

Of course, the ground is cut from under us in this whole line of argument by those ingenious thinkers who have recently disinterred (with such ill-omened timeliness for the vivisection debate) Descartes’ supposed doctrine, that the appearance of pain and pleasure in the brutes is a mere delusion, and that they are only automata,—“a superior kind of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence as a bee simulates a mathematician.” If this conclusion, on which modern science is to be congratulated, be accepted, it follows, of course, that we should give no more consideration to the fatigue of a noble hunter than to the creaking wood of a rocking-horse; and that the emotions a child bestows on its doll will be more serious than those we bestow on a dog who dies of grief on his master’s grave. Should it appear to us, however, on the contrary (as it certainly does to me), that there is quite as good evidence thatdogs and elephants reason as that certain physiologists reason, and a great deal better evidence that they—the animals—feel, we may perhaps dismiss the Cartesianism of the nineteenth century, and proceed without further delay to endeavor to define more particularly the fitting sentiment of man to sentient brutes. We have seen we ought to start with a distinct sense of some degree of moral responsibility as regards them. What shape should that sense assume?

We have been in the habit of indulging ourselves in all manner of antipathies to special animals, some of them having, perhaps, their source andraison d’êtrein the days of our remote but not illustrious ancestors,

“When wild in woods the noble savage ran”;

or those of a still earlier date, who were, asMr.Darwin says, “arboreal in their habits,” ere yet we had deserved the reproach of having “made ourselves tailless and hairless and multiplied folds to our brain.” Other prejudices, again, are mere personal whims, three-fourths of them being pure affectation. A man will decline to sit in a room with an inoffensive cat, and a lady screams at the sight of a mouse, which is infinitely more distressed at therencontrethan she. I have known an individual, otherwise distinguished for audacity, “make tracks”across several fields to avoid a placidly ruminating cow. In our present stage of civilization, these silly prejudices are barbarisms and anachronisms, if not vulgarisms, and should be treated like exhibitions of ignorance or childishness. For our remote progenitors before mentioned, tusky and hirsute, struggling for existence with the cave bear and the mammoth in the howling wilderness of a yet uncultured world, there was no doubt justification for regarding the terrible beasts around them with the hatred which comes of fear. But the animal creation, at least throughout Europe, has been subdued for ages; and all its tribes are merely dwellers by sufferance in a vanquished province. Their position as regards us appeals to every spark of generosity alight in our bosoms, and ought to make us ashamed of our whims and antipathies toward beings so humble. Shall man arrogate the title of “lord of creation,” and not show himself, at the least,bon princeto his poor subjects? It is not too much to ask that, even toward wild animals, our feelings should be those of royal clemency and indulgence,—of pleasure in the beauty and grace of such of them as are beautiful; of admiration for their numberless wondrous instincts; of sympathy with their delight in the joys of the forest and the fields of air. Few, I suppose, of men with any impressionability canwatch a lark ascending into the sky of a summer’s morning without some dim echo of the feelings which inspired Shelley’s Ode. This is, however, only a specially vivid instance of a sympathy which might be almost universal, and which, so far as we learn to feel it, touches all nature for us with a magic wand.

If we are compelled to fight with them, if they are our natural enemies and can never be anything else, then let us wage war upon them in loyal sort, as we contended against the Russians at Balaklava; and, if we catch any prisoners, deal with them chivalrously or at least mercifully. This, indeed (to do justice to sportsmen, much as I dislike their pursuit), I have always observed to be the spirit of the old-fashioned country gentleman, before the gross slaughtering ofbattuesand despicable pigeon-matches were heard of in the land.

As to domestic animals, their demands on us, did we read them aright, are not so much those of petitioners for mercy as of rightful claimants of justice. We have caused their existence, and are responsible that they should be on the whole happy and not miserable. We take their services to carry our burdens, to enhance our pleasures, to guard our homes and our flocks. In the case of many of them, we accept the fondest fidelity and an affection such ashuman beings scarcely give once in a lifetime. They watch for us, work for us, bear often weary imprisonment and slavery in our service, and not seldom mourn for us with breaking hearts when we die. If we conceive of an arbiter sitting by and watching alike our behavior and the poor brutes’ toil and love, can we suppose he would treat it as merely a piece ofgenerosityon our part, which we were free to leave unfulfilled without blame, that we should behave considerately to such an humble friend, supply him with food, water, and shelter, forbear to overwork him, and end his harmless life at last with the least possible pain? Would he not demand it of us as the simplest matter ofjustice?[24]

For those who accept the Darwinian theory, and believe that the relationship between man and the brutes is not only one of similarity, but of actual kinship in blood, it would have seemed only natural that this new view should have brought forth a burst of fresh sympathy and tenderness. If our physical frames, with all their quivering nerves and susceptibilities to a thousand pains, be, indeed, only thefour-footed creature’s body a little modified by development; if our minds only overlap and transcend theirs, but are grown out of those humbler brains; if all our moral qualities, our love and faith and sense of justice, be only their affection and fidelity and dim sense of wrong extended into wider realms,—then we bear in ourselves the irresistible testimony to their claims on our sympathy. And if, like so many of the disciples of the same new philosophy, we are unhappy enough to believe that both man and brute when laid in the grave awake no more, then, above all, it would seem that this common lot of a few pleasures and many pains, to be followed by annihilation, would move any heart to compassion. In the great, silent, hollow universe in which these souls believe themselves to stand, how base does it seem to turn on the weaker, unoffending beings around them, and spoil their little gleam of life and joy under the sun!

Nothing is more startling to me than the fact that some of the leading apostles of this philosophy, and even its respected author himself, should in one and the same breath tell us that an ape, for example, is actually our own flesh and blood, and that it is right and proper to treat apes after the fashion of Professors Munk and Goltz and Ferrier. These gentlemen, as regards the poorquadrumana, arerather “more than kin,” and rather “less than kind.”

For those who, whether they believe in evolution or not, still hold faith in the existence of a divine Lord of man and brute, the reasons for sympathy are, in another way, still stronger. That the Christian religion did not, from the first, like the Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Brahminist, impress its followers with the duty of mercy to the brutes; that it was left to a few tender-hearted saints, likeSt.Francis, to connect the creatures in any way with the worship of the Creator, and to the later development of Protestantism to formulate any doctrine on the subject of duty toward them,—is a paradox which would need much space to explain. Modern religion, at all events, by whatever name it is called, seems tending more and more to throw an additional tender sacredness over our relations to the “unoffending creatures which he,” their Maker, “loves,” and to make us recognize a latent truth in the curiously hackneyed lines of Coleridge concerning him who “prayeth best” and also loveth best “both man and bird and beast.” Where that great and far-reaching softener of hearts, the sense of our own failures and offences, is vividly present, the position we hold to creatures whohave never done wrongis always found inexpressibly touching. Tobe kind to them and rejoice in their happiness seems just one of the few ways in which we can act a god-like part in our little sphere, and display the mercy for which we hope in our turn. Whichever way we take it, I conceive we reach the same conclusion. The only befitting feeling for human beings to entertain toward brutes is, as the very word suggests, the feeling ofhumanity: or, as we may interpret it, the sentiment of sympathy, so far as we can cultivate fellow-feeling; of pity, so far as we know them to suffer; of mercy, so far as we can spare their sufferings; of kindness and benevolence, so far as it is in our power to make them happy.

There is nothing fanatical about this humanity. It does not call on us to renounce any of the useful or needful avocations of life as regards animals, but rather would it make the man imbued with it perform them all the better.[25]We assuredly need not, because we become humane, sacrifice the higher life for the lower, as in the wondrous Buddhist parable so beautifully rendered in theLight of Asia, where “Lord Buddha,” in one of his million lives, giveshimself, out of pity, to be devoured by a famishing tiger who cannot feed her cubs, and

“The great cat’s burning breathMixed with the last sigh of such fearless love.”

We need not even copy the sweet lady in the “Sensitive Plant” who made the bees and moths and ephemeridæ her attendants:—

“But all killing insects and gnawing worms,And things of obscene and unlovely forms,She bore in a basket of Indian woofInto the rough woods far aloof,—“In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,The freshest her gentle hands could pullFor the poor banished insects, whose intent,Although they did ill, was innocent.”

This is poetry not meant for practice, and yet even these hyperboles carry a breath as of Eden along with them. Of Eden did I say? Nay, rather of the later Paradise for which the soul of the greatest of the prophets yearned, where “they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.”

I will not attempt here to define how the sentiment of humanity to the brutes, thoroughly ingrained into a man’s heart, would make him decide the question of field sports. My own impression is that it would lead him to abandon first, and withutter disgust, such wretched amusements as pigeon-matches andbattuesof half-tame pheasants; and, later, those sports in which, as in fox-hunting and coursing and duck-shooting, the sympathy of the sportsman with his hounds and horse, or his greyhound or retriever, is uppermost in his mind, to the exclusion of the wild and scarcely seen object of his pursuit. In nine kinds of such sports, I believe, out of ten, it is rather a case of ill-divided sympathy for animals than of lack of it which inspires the sportsman; and not many would find enjoyment where neither horse nor dog had part,—like poor Robertson, of Brighton, sitting for hours in a tub in a marsh to shoot wild duck, and counting the period so spent as “hours of delight!”

But there is one practice respecting which the influence of such a sentiment of humanity as we have supposed must have an unmistakable result. It must put an absolute stop to vivisection. To accustom ourselves and our children to regard animals with sympathy; to beware of giving them pain, and rejoice when it is possible for us to give them pleasure; to study their marvellous instincts, and trace the dawnings of reason in their sagacious acts; to accept their services and their affection, and give them in return such pledges of protection as our kind words and caresses,—to do this, and thencalmly consent to hand them over to be dissected alive, this is too monstrous to be borne.De deux choses l’une.Either we must cherish animals—and then we must abolish vivisection—or we must sanction vivisection; and then, for very shame’s sake, and lest we poison the springs of pity and sympathy in our breasts and the breasts of our children, we must renounce the ghastly farce of petting or protecting animals, and pretending to recognize their noble and lovable qualities. If love and courage and fidelity, lodged in the heart of a dog, have no claim on us to prevent us from dissecting that heart even while yet it beats with affection; if the human-like intelligence working in a monkey’s brain do not forbid (but rather invite) us to mutilate that brain, morsel by morsel, till the last glimmering of mind and playfulness die out in dulness and death,—if this be so, then, in Heaven’s name, let us at least have done with our cant of “humanity,” and abolish our Acts of Parliament, and dissolve our Bands of Mercy, and our three hundred Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty throughout the world.

The idea of vivisection (to use the phrase of its two thousand advocates who memorialized Sir Richard Cross) rests on the conception of an animal (a dog, for example) as “a carnivorous creature, valuable for purposes of research,”—a mechanism,in short, of nerves and muscles, bones and arteries, which, as they added, it would be a pity to “withdraw from investigation.” The crass materialism which thus regards such a creature as a dog (and would, doubtless, if its followers spoke out, be found similarly to regard a man) is at the opposite pole of thought and feeling from the recognition of the animal in its higher nature as an object of our tenderness and sympathy. We cannot hold both views at once. If we take the higher one, the lower must become abhorrent in our eyes. There is, there ought to be, no question in the matter of a little more or a little less of torture, or of dispute whether anæsthetics, when they can be employed, usually effect complete and final or only partial and temporary insensibility; or of whether such processes as putting an animal into a stove over a fire till it expires in ten or twenty minutes ought to be called “baking it alive,” or described by some less distressing and homely phraseology. It is the simple idea of dealing with a living, conscious, sensitive, and intelligent creature as if it were dead and senseless matter against which the whole spirit of true humanity revolts. It is the notion of such absolute despotism as shall justify not merely taking life, but converting the entire existence of the animal into a misfortune, which we denounce as abrutal misconception of the relations between the higher and the lower creatures, and an utter anachronism in the present stage of human moral feeling. A hundred years ago, had physiologists frankly avowed that they recognized no claims on the part of the brutes which should stop them from torturing them, they would have been only on the level of their contemporaries. But to-day they are behind the age; ay, sixty years behind the legislature and the poor Irish gentleman who “ruled the houseless wilds of Connemara,” and had the glory of giving his name to Martin’s Act. How their claim for a “free vivisecting table” may be looked back upon a century to come, we may perhaps foretell with no great chance of error. In his last book, published ten years ago, Sir Arthur Helps wrote these memorable words: “It appears to me that the advancement of the world is to be measured by the increase of humanity and the decrease of cruelty.... I am convinced that, if an historian were to sum the gains and losses of the world at the close of each recorded century, there might be much which was retrograde in other aspects of human life and conduct, but nothing could show a backward course in humanity” (pp.195, 196). As I have said ere now, the battle of mercy, like that of freedom

“Once begun,Though often lost, is always won.”

Even should all the scientific men in Europe unite in a resolution that “vivisection is necessary,” just as all the Dominicans would have united three hundred years ago to resolve that autos-da-fé were “necessary,” or as all the lawyers and magistrates that thepeine forte et durewas “necessary,” or as the statesmen of America did thirty years ago that negro slavery was “necessary,” yet the “necessity” will disappear in the case of the scientific torture of animals as in all the rest. The days of vivisection are numbered.

FOOTNOTES:[21]A touching story of such sheep-gathering was recently told me on good authority. A shepherd lost his large flock on the Scotch mountains in a fog. After fruitless search, he returned to his cottage, bidding his collie find the sheep, if she could. The collie, who was near giving birth to her young, understood his orders, and disappeared in the mist, not returning for many hours. At last, she came home in miserable plight, driving before her the last stray sheep, and carrying in her mouth a puppy of her own! She had of necessity left the rest of her litter to perish on the hills and in the intervals of their birth the poor beast had performed her task and driven home the sheep. Her last puppy only she had contrived to save.[22]The best effort to supply the missing chapter of ethics is the charming and eloquent volume,Rights of an Animal, by E. B. Nicholson. I thankfully recognize the candor wherewith the author has tackled the difficult problems of the case, and the value of his demonstration that the law of England assumes the fundamental principle that cruelty to an animal is an offenceper se, and that it is not necessary to show that it injures any human owner or spectator. In this respect, as in all others, our Act (11 and 12 Vict. c. 39) immeasurably transcends the FrenchLoi Grammont, which condemns only cruelty exhibited in public places and painful to the spectators.Mr.Nicholson justifies vivisection only so far as it can be rendered absolutely painless by anæsthetics. To such of us as have seen through that delusion,cadit quaestio.[23]As a recent example of this doctrine, see an article in theFortnightly Reviewfor Feb. 1, 1882. “Is it not,” the author says, “the very basis of ethical doctrine(!) that the moral rights of any being depend on its ethical nature?”[24]I have endeavored elsewhere to work out this hypothesis of an umpire between man and brute, as a method of helping us to a solution of the problem of what are and what are not lawful actions on our parts toward animals. The reader who may be interested in the inquiry may obtain my pamphlet,The Right of Tormenting, price 2d., at the office of the Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, 1 Victoria Street, Westminster.[25]In fact, many men who pursue such trades, notably butchers, are genuinely humane, and do their best to get through their work in the most merciful way. Several of them have recently expressed warm satisfaction on obtaining Baxter’s mask, whereby oxen may be instantaneously killed without the chance of a misdirected blow. The mask is to be obtained fromMr.Baxter, Ealing Dean, W.

[21]A touching story of such sheep-gathering was recently told me on good authority. A shepherd lost his large flock on the Scotch mountains in a fog. After fruitless search, he returned to his cottage, bidding his collie find the sheep, if she could. The collie, who was near giving birth to her young, understood his orders, and disappeared in the mist, not returning for many hours. At last, she came home in miserable plight, driving before her the last stray sheep, and carrying in her mouth a puppy of her own! She had of necessity left the rest of her litter to perish on the hills and in the intervals of their birth the poor beast had performed her task and driven home the sheep. Her last puppy only she had contrived to save.

[22]The best effort to supply the missing chapter of ethics is the charming and eloquent volume,Rights of an Animal, by E. B. Nicholson. I thankfully recognize the candor wherewith the author has tackled the difficult problems of the case, and the value of his demonstration that the law of England assumes the fundamental principle that cruelty to an animal is an offenceper se, and that it is not necessary to show that it injures any human owner or spectator. In this respect, as in all others, our Act (11 and 12 Vict. c. 39) immeasurably transcends the FrenchLoi Grammont, which condemns only cruelty exhibited in public places and painful to the spectators.Mr.Nicholson justifies vivisection only so far as it can be rendered absolutely painless by anæsthetics. To such of us as have seen through that delusion,cadit quaestio.

[23]As a recent example of this doctrine, see an article in theFortnightly Reviewfor Feb. 1, 1882. “Is it not,” the author says, “the very basis of ethical doctrine(!) that the moral rights of any being depend on its ethical nature?”

[24]I have endeavored elsewhere to work out this hypothesis of an umpire between man and brute, as a method of helping us to a solution of the problem of what are and what are not lawful actions on our parts toward animals. The reader who may be interested in the inquiry may obtain my pamphlet,The Right of Tormenting, price 2d., at the office of the Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, 1 Victoria Street, Westminster.

[25]In fact, many men who pursue such trades, notably butchers, are genuinely humane, and do their best to get through their work in the most merciful way. Several of them have recently expressed warm satisfaction on obtaining Baxter’s mask, whereby oxen may be instantaneously killed without the chance of a misdirected blow. The mask is to be obtained fromMr.Baxter, Ealing Dean, W.

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