Sentiment is a creature of education. A child will naturally imitate its
parents. If they are unfeeling and cruel, the child will be the same,
at least until it falls under a different influence. Sentiment is not
inherited. The average child is cruel and heartless until old enough to
imitate the sentimental spirit of old people. Therefore, it should be
the first lesson impressed upon the child mind that cruelty and wanton
heartlessness is brutal, and does not belong to civilized man.
In my own case I have always been opposed to keeping pet animals or birds
confined in a cage—no, not always: When a boy I was always catching birds
and squirrels and rabbits to start a menagerie. I remember one time of
keeping a red squirrel in a cage for two years. I hadn’t then learned
that kindness to the weakest of God’s creatures shows a largeness of the
human heart. I was then a lad of fifteen years.
But one day while watching the red squirrel leaping from one side of
the cage to the bottom, then bounding to the other side and back again,
and on to the opposite side and back again, over and over again, all
through the day, and day after day, for the exercise it needed to keep
its health—one day while watching the poor imprisoned animal at its
daily exercise, the thought came to me that the little animal would be
so much happier outside the cage. Then it dawned on me that I was simply
keeping the poor thing imprisoned to gratify my own selfish pleasure.
Simply to look at and enjoy its efforts to make life tolerable under such
distressing conditions. I had actually been enjoying the restless efforts
of the squirrel to make prison life healthful; for had the animal sat
down to mourn and pout and sorrow for the freedom it once enjoyed, it
would have died in a few weeks.
My heart smote me. I saw what a cruel jailor I had been. It’s bad enough
to imprison bad men and shut them away from the sunlight and flowers
and the smiles of good women and children, just as though darkness and
heartaches and misery would make a human being better. But here I was
imprisoning an innocent animal simply for the selfish pleasure that comes
from the possession of things not justly my own. Like the millionaire who
gets a monopoly on the necessaries of life, and forces the people to pay
tribute into his coffers for the sole and only pleasure of possessing
more dollars than his neighbors.
If he has sentiment enough to use those dollars for the benefit of
civilization and to relieve the distress of the people, it is not so bad,
but hoarding up for the pleasure that comes from sheer possession, is
worse than brutal—it is maniacal.
Well, my conscience smote me on the educated end of my sentiment, and one
day I opened the cage and let the squirrel go back to the woods. I had
learned a lesson I never forgot. The awakened sentiment in my soul never
slumbered again.
Sentiment is contagious. My boy caught the happy mental disorder much
earlier than his father did. A few weeks ago, he, too, started a
menagerie. He caught two mice and put them in a cage. At the end of two
weeks his young heart felt the sentimental pangs of conscience, and he
liberated his unwilling prisoners.
The world is growing better. The boy’s sentiment did as much for him in
two weeks as mine did for me in two years. The two liberated mice may
do me a trifle of damage while at large, but when I consider that the
boy let his heart out at the same time he liberated the mice, I knew the
world would be the gainer in the end.