Whatever we may think of the artistic and critical influence of Mr
Ruskin on his age, we cannot but view with admiration and reverence much
of his moral teaching, and there are in his writings innumerable
isolated words of wisdom which would be well printed in letters of gold
wherever men and women congregate and youth is educated. Amongst these
is one which could not be too often reproduced before the eyes of an
indifferent, egotistic, and cynical generation. It is this: 'Whosoever
is not actively kind, is cruel.' It is an absolute truth, but one which
is very little heeded.
I will not here speak of the three crystallised and applauded forms of
cruelty, war, sport, and scientific experiment. I wish to speak only of
what is by scientists termed 'lay' cruelty, but which I would myself
call general and scarcely conscious cruelty--the ill-treatment of all
sentient creatures not human, by human creatures, due to the apathy,
egotism, and unkindness of the latter. It is to this form of cruelty
that Mr Ruskin alludes in the sentence previously quoted.
The cruelty of earlier times had its chief cause in violence; the
cruelty of modern times has its chief cause in cowardice and
selfishness. The character of the cruelty has altered, but its
prevalence remains equally widespread and its motive is more
contemptible. The modern world regards the pillory and the stocks as
barbarous; but it allows the railway signalman to be riveted to his post
for eighteen consecutive hours, and sees no harm in it. The human race
was then ruder, no doubt, but more generous; more violent in some ways,
but more magnanimous. Remember the familiar story of the Roman who wrung
the neck of the dove which took refuge in his bosom from the pursuing
bird of prey, and was stoned by his fellow-citizens. In the modern world
there would be no movement of indignation against such an act;
gentlewomen and men see the necks wrung of the wounded birds in the
shooting enclosures from Hurlingham to Monte Carlo without the slightest
emotion of pity or effort at censure.
Not long ago I spoke of this to a young and beautiful Englishwoman of
the great world, and she answered, 'Yes, it is useless to attempt to
move them to any feeling for animals. You can get them to do something
for people, because they think it does them good with the masses, keeps
off revolution, and helps in canvassing. But for cruelty they do not
care in the least.' She spoke in simplicity, with no intention of
sarcasm, but she could not have uttered a greater truth, or a more
cutting satire.
There are exceptions, doubtless, but they are not numerous enough to
leaven the great mass of indifferent and selfish people. Animals find
but few friends. Alas! they have no votes!
There is, perhaps, one thing still more nauseating than the world's
apathy, and that is its self-praise; its admiration of its own
charities, so miserably insignificant beside the extravagance of its own
pleasures. When we think how little is done by those who could do so
much to influence even their own households to justice and tenderness,
one cannot wonder that the populace is unmoved by the occasional
invitation to them from a higher world to display those virtues which
the rich prefer rather to inculcate than to practise.
Last year in England, in a nobleman's house, a footman beat a small dog,
which ran into the offices, with a red-hot poker, and piled burning
coals on it until it died in indescribable agony. I wrote and asked the
nobleman in question if he had dismissed this monster from his service,
the man having been only punished by the Bench with a slight fine; the
nobleman answered me so evasively that it was easy to read between the
lines and see that he had retained the footman in his service. This act
on the part of the servant was an extreme case of hideous cruelty, but
his employer's condonation is by no means an extreme case; it is,
indeed, a very common sample of a master's indifference, of that
indifference which is practically connivance. People abandon their
stables to their coachmen, their dogs to their keepers; even the animals
they call pets are frequently allowed to suffer from servants, or
children, and are bullied, neglected, and teased with impunity.
The disgusting spectacle of dog-catching by the police is allowed to be
presented in the public streets of most capitals of Europe, continually;
and there is never the outburst of revolted feeling which such an
offence to all humane sentiment and common decency should provoke. If
such spectacles excited in the general public one-thousandth part of
such disgust as they would excite in any really civilised people, it
would be impossible for such scenes to exist, in either hemisphere, to
shock the sight and sense of those of more refined taste and more humane
feelings.
There is an excellent association for the protection of birds, but its
aims are so little in touch with its generation that it obtains only the
most meagre support. Great names and patrician names are very rare upon
its lists, and at its public meetings its cause has its neck at once
broken by the question of sport being rigorously excluded by its
chairman, who is a noted sportsman!
There is an institution in London which calls itself a 'home for lost
dogs'; under this affecting title it appeals for funds, as though it
were inspired solely by love and anxiety for the happiness of dogs, and
for the protection and prolongation of their lives. In reality it is an
institution for the organised suffocation of fifteen or twenty thousand
dogs annually, which have been kidnapped by the police and taken
forcibly from their owners; it is a slaughter-house for the assistance
and convenience of the police, and as such should be maintained out of
the funds of the Government. Nothing but the most criminal apathy in the
public could permit a slaughter-house to masquerade as a 'Home' and be
a petitioner to charity. The word 'home' implies peace and safety, and
should not be permitted to cover a place of legalised butchery.
Think how odious to the horse must be the mere forcing of the bit into
his mouth and of the headstall over his ears. Without speaking of the
torture of the spur, the stinging of the lash, the dreadful weight upon
the spine from which the riding-horse suffers, and the dreadful strain
upon the lungs and withers to which the draught and driving-horse is
incessantly condemned, only realise the continued imprisonment and
galling servitude in which the equine race are forced to dwell, and ask
yourself if, in common pity or justice, that life should not be as much
alleviated and lightened as it is possible to make it. Yet is there one
owner of horses in a million who takes the trouble to see for himself
how his own stables are organised, or maintains out of gratitude, in
their old age or in their failing speed, the horses which have served
him in their prime?
Many wild-beast shows of the present hour are as cruel as were the
gladiatorial games of Rome, and far less manly. I can imagine no
possible argument which can be put forward for the license awarded to
the travelling caravans which attend fairs and feasts all the world
over, and which are hells of animal torture. What is called the taming
of beasts is the most cruel, demoralising, and loathsome of pursuits;
the horrible wickedness of its methods is known to all, and the appetite
it awakens and stimulates in the public is to the last degree debasing.
Yet not the smallest effort is made to end it.
The encouragement of menageries, where wild animals are cowed and
maltreated into trembling misery and forced to imitate the foolish
attitudes and comedies of men, lies entirely with the public, _i.e._,
with the world at large. If the nations were in any true sense
civilised, such forms of diversion would, I repeat, be insupportable to
them. Dancing dogs, dancing bears, performing wolves, enslaved
elephants, would one and all, from the lion tortured on a bicycle in a
circus, to the little guinea-pig playing a drum in the streets, be so
sickeningly painful to a truly civilised public that the stolid human
brutes who live by their sufferings would not dare to train and exhibit
them.
Not long ago there was a somewhat silly discussion in the English press
on the effect of perfumes on desert animals in captivity, of the
excitement and pleasure produced on them by such odours. It occurred to
no one of the sapient correspondents that such perfumes did, no doubt,
recall to the poor imprisoned animals the intense fragrance of the
flowers in their own jungles and tropical forests. All animals are
intensely sensitive to odours, because their olfactory nerves telegraph
to their brains in a way of which our own dull nostrils are utterly
unconscious.
With what pretension can a world call itself humane when in its codes
all 'wild' animals are unprotected by laws, and may be treated with
whatever brutality is desired? When it is a question for the dweller in
a jungle to kill a wild beast or be killed himself, one can understand
that he chooses the first of the two alternatives. But this is no excuse
for the man in cities to drag a captured lion to make the sport of
fools, and to perish wretchedly of diseased joints, thwarted longings,
and the anguish of nostalgia.
It is idle to speak of the civilisation of a world in which such things
are possible. From a hygienic point of view alone, these poor tormented
creatures, cooped up in filthy cages, breathing fetid air night and day,
hearing each other's piteous cries, having no single want or instinct
gratified, ill-fed, diseased, miserable, and ravaged by parasites, must
be one of the most unwholesome centres of contagion conceivable. A polar
bear is at this moment being taken through Europe for exhibition in a
caravan; he is kept in a cage in which he cannot turn; he has a pan of
water two inches deep, and a few ounces of bread as his only food!
There is no animal which is not to be attached by kindness and justice
shown to him. The lion of Rosa Bonheur fell into decline from grief at
being sent from her keeping to that of the Jardin des Plantes when she
was absent on a distant voyage. She returned to find him dying; he
recognised her voice and opened his eyes with a feeble roar of pleasure,
then laid his great head down upon her knees and died. No one who knows
human nature by long experience can assert for a moment that its
fidelity can be secured by benefits, or its sincerity insured by
affection; but when kindness and regard are shown to 'the beasts which
perish,' these never fail to give them back tenfold.
Let me here tell a true history, which I should have told to Matthew
Arnold had he been living then, with entire certainty of his sympathy.
A little dog of Maltese breed, who belonged to my mother, was
inconsolable at her death. For three weeks he refused all food, and was
kept alive by nourishment artificially administered. He sat up, and
begged, day after day, before her bed and before her favourite chair,
until he dropped from sheer exhaustion. He wanted for nothing that I
could give him; and no habit of his daily life was changed; but he was
unhappy. Whenever the door opened he thought she entered. He ran and
looked into every stranger's face. He knew everything which had belonged
to her. His sorrow injured his health; his heart became weak, and he
died of cardiac paralysis at six years old.
What could human affection offer superior in fidelity and feeling?
'That loving heart, that patient soul,
Had they indeed no longer span
To run their course, and reach their goal,
And read their homily to man?'
I think that not only is their affection undervalued, but that the
intelligence of animals is greatly underrated. Man having but one
conception of intelligence, his own, does not endeavour to comprehend
another which is different, and differently exhibited and expressed. I
have before now said in print that if our mind exceeds the mind of
animals and birds in much, theirs exceeds ours at least in some things,
as their sight, scent, and hearing far surpass ours.
When we remember also that these other races are absolutely alone, are
never aided by man, are only, on the contrary, hindered by him,
opposed, thwarted, and persecuted by him, their achievements are,
relatively to their opportunities, much more wonderful than any of his.
The elements which are his great foes are likewise theirs; they have to
encounter and suffer all the woes of tempest, hurricane, flood, the
width of barren seas, the hunger on solitary shores; and they have also
in his ruthless and unceasing spite an enemy more cruel than any with
which he himself has to contend. If we meditate on this unquestionable
fact, we shall be forced to admit that Cristoforo Colombo was not a
greater hero than many a little swallow.
But scarcely anyone does meditate on these marvels; one in a million,
one in a generation, at the most. To nearly the whole of humanity the
wonderful and beautiful races with which the world teems, which are for
ever living side by side with the human, do not exist except in so far
as they contribute to the pleasure of slaughter, or the greed of
commerce, or of gambling. For to the majority of men and women all
organisms except their own are as though they were not.
There is no sympathy with these interesting and mysterious lives led
side by side with man, but ignored by him entirely, except when by him
persecuted. The nest of the weaver bird is to the full as ingenious and
as marvellous as the dome of St Peter's or St Paul's. The beaver State,
and the bee State, are as intricate in organisation as the Constitution
of the French Republic, and the British Monarchy, and are distinctly
superior in many parts of their organisation to either of these. The
passage of the white ants through a jungle and across a continent is
quite as admirable in unison and skill and order as the human march to
Chitral; and the annual flights of the storks, of the Solan geese, of
the wild ducks, exhibit qualities of obedience to a chosen commander, of
endurance, of observation, and of wisdom, not exceeded by any human
Arctic or Australian exploring party.
The vain-glorious assumption that we have a monopoly of what is called
reason cannot be allowed by those who bring a reason of their own,
unbiassed, to the study of animals, not under the unnatural conditions
of the laboratory, but in natural freedom and peace.
No skill of a Stanley or a Nansen ever exceeded that of the hound Maida
in tracing Sir Walter Scott, and no journey of a Burton or a Speke was
ever so wonderful as the migratory voyage of a martin or a nightingale.
I have said this ere now; and it can never be repeated too often, for
nothing is so cruel as the vanity of man, and nothing so opposed to his
own true progress as his blind and dogged contempt for all races not
shaped exactly like his own.
The correspondence which has been general in the English press regarding
the muzzling of dogs, has been conspicuous for its silliness, ignorance,
and cruelty, but above all by its disgusting selfishness; and an editor
of a very popular organ was not ashamed to print that if only one human
life could be saved, etc., etc., disregarding the fact that men were at
the time being slaughtered by dysentery and fever, by the scores, for no
better object than to go and cut down cotton trees at Coomassie; whilst
deaths by starvation, a perfectly preventible cause, are so common in
English cities that the reports of them scarcely awaken a passing regret
or compassion. The veneration for human life which is developed by
journalists when a lion kills his gaoler, or when a dog is supposed to
have been the cause of his tormentor's death, is comical in these
gentlemen of the press, who, to help a speculation, open out a new mart,
or influence the share lists, will ravenously demand a military
expedition, or a naval demonstration, to sabre, shell, burn, and ravage
upon distant strands.
The attitude of the Brahmin, to whom all forms of life are sacred, is
intelligible, estimable, and consistent; the attitude of the savage
conqueror, to whom thousands of dead men and thousands of dead beasts
are alike so much carrion, is intelligible and reasonable, whilst
brutal. The attitude of the journalist and county councilman is not
either; it possesses neither logic nor common sense, and is not
estimable or reasonable, but only contemptible.
If there be one thing more loathsome than the carnage of war, it is the
Red Cross societies following in its train. But the modern world, being
conscious that the butchery of war ill accords with its aesthetic and
religious pretensions, gives a sop to its conscience by sending the
ambulance side by side with the gun carriage. A more robust and more
honest temper did not evade the truth that the least brutal war is the
one most immediately and conclusively destructive; the slaughter of
wounded men was more truly merciful than the modern system of surgery
and nursing, which saves shattered constitutions and ruined health to
drag out a miserable and artificially prolonged existence.
There is, however, something which the ordinary human mind finds
soothing and delightful in this formula of 'the sanctity of human life,'
when combined with a corresponding disregard for human and for all other
life. The good Christian likes to be raised aloft, in his own eyes, from
all those other races which he imagines were given to him for his use
and abuse by a gracious Deity. He loves to think that both God and the
neighbouring policeman are watching over him; and taking care alike of
his soul and of his greatcoat. In the enormous vanity of the Christian
who believes all the laws of the universe altered for him, or in the
equally enormous vanity of the scientist who arrogates to himself the
right to dogmatise on the mysteries of creation, this attitude is not
surprising. But in either the philosophic mind; or the poetic
temperament, it is so because to the philosopher the difference between
the human and the other races cannot appear very great, whilst to the
poet the solidarity of all sentient life must always seem
unquestionable. That friend, and scholar, and poet for whom I mourn as
freshly as though he had died but yesterday did not disdain to greet a
brother's spirit in
'That liquid, melancholy eye
From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs
Seem'd surging the Virgilian cry,
The sense of tears in mortal things,'
for these lines were written by Matthew Arnold to 'only a dog.'
It is not in foolishly endeavouring to make animals our prisoners and
puppets, in trying to force them to count, to caper, or to play cards,
that we reach insight into their natures and their minds. It is in
loving them and respecting them as he loved and respected Geist and Kai.
I use the latter word advisedly, for whoever does not in a fair degree,
as with a human friend, respect the freedom, the preference, and the
idiosyncrasy of an animal will never reach true comprehension of him.
A writer wrote the other day, 'People speak of the law of nature; but
who feels it? There is no such emotion known in the ordinary life of the
world.' The persons who will let their dinner wait whilst they watch a
sunset fade over sea or moor, or who will leave the share list unread to
see the morning dew make silver globes of the gossamer in the grass, are
so few that they may almost be said not to exist, if we except a poet
here, an artist there; and the sense of kinship with races not human can
only come to those whose own kinship with earth and air and sky is
strong enough to resist the dulling and debasing influences of
artificial life, of life amongst men and their trivialities, frauds, and
vanities.
'The sun is God,' said Turner, when he lay dying, and, alas! saw that
sun only through the mists of London. But how many see the sun at all,
even when they live where it is most radiant? How many think of the sun
during the long day it illumines? The light is taken as a matter of
course, as our breath is drawn through our lungs. There is no gratitude
for it.
In similar manner there is no sense of kinship with the winged children
of the air, with the four-footed dwellers beside us on the earth. Almost
the only recognition we give them is maltreatment. At other times the
indifference of our unspeakable fatuity rises in a dust cloud between us
and them. Of gratitude for their companionship, their aid, their
patience, their many virtues, there is not a trace in those who use them
and abuse them, no more than there is gratitude for the beauty of the
rose or the fragrance of the violet.
As 'the winds of March take the world with beauty,' every pasture and
coppice is full of blossom, passed unnoticed by thousands in every daily
country walk; so in the same manner do the multitudes trample down, and
pass by, the ineffable charm and fragrance of disregarded affections,
and unappreciated qualities, in the other races of earth.
Hang a poor woodland bird in a cage, if you can bear to look on such a
captive, above a blossoming honeysuckle or hawthorn, and note his
anguish of remembrance, his ecstasy of hope, his frantic effort to be
free. But the accursed wires are between him and the familiar blossoms,
between him and the blue sky; in a little while he realises that he is a
prisoner; the fluttering joy goes out of his heart and his wings; his
feathers grow ruffled and dull, his eyes are veiled, he sits motionless
and heartbroken, and the breeze of the springtime blows past him, and
never more will bear him on its buoyant way.
Living wild song-birds are sold at a halfpenny each by thousands in the
London slums, and as many more die--nay, thrice as many more--before
they reach the streets, packed close and jammed together in hampers and
crates.
Yet the English Home Secretary, on being asked by a deputation to put an
end to this abominable traffic, answered that it was desirable to do as
little as possible in the way of legislation!
For legislators, always eager to make cruel and coercive laws, prefer to
let humane ones be substituted by what they call 'the gradual education
of the people.' But this gradual education is so extremely gradual that
its progress is imperceptible; it may even be justly suspected that it
is chiefly a backward movement; and such education, as far as education
by example goes, is hindered, not helped, by what are called the
cultured classes.
In this, our own present day, bull fights become at once popular
wherever they are allowed, and with women as much so as with men, and I
am certain that if the gladiatorial shows of Imperial Rome were
introduced at Olympia the London crowds would in the main be delighted
with them, and the London women would eagerly turn down their thumbs.
Why not? They go to see the tight-rope walking and the trapeze jump at
the Crystal Palace and the Aquarium; and the only possible attraction in
these is the probability that in each case the performers will be killed
one day; apart from this chance there is no interest whatever in the
spectacle. If the authorities were induced to permit them, gladiatorial
shows would become so popular with the women of Belgravia and Mayfair
that no one would care for anything less exciting, and the Oxford and
Cambridge sports would be deserted with contempt as offering no
attraction.
The desire for excitement is the most conspicuous feature, and the most
dangerous disease of the age; anything which provides it is welcome;
people are bored despite their incessant search of distraction, and
anything which will exorcise the spectre of boredom is eagerly received;
and after all it would be absurd if persons who go to see steeplechases
pretended to be too squeamish to cry the 'Habet'! Let the managers of
Olympia obtain permission for gladiatorial games (death being
guaranteed), and I will promise them that "all London" in the most
fashionable sense of those words will crowd from April to August to see
the sport. If the ladies could be allowed to descend into the arena, to
touch the dying bodies, as Nero used to like to do, to see the faint
life still lingering shrink and writhe, this success would be still
greater; and Nero was but a primitive creature, he had but a heated iron
wand, whereas my ladies could be provided by their favourite scientist
with the much more excruciating torment of electricity. Imagine what
exquisite little jewelled instruments of torture, made to fasten on to a
bracelet, or hide within a ring, would fill the shops in Bond Street and
Piccadilly. 'We are going electrolysing!' would be heard from all the
pretty lips of the leaders of society; and they would cease to care for
their bicycles, and auto-cars, and even for the discussion of actresses'
new gowns. 'How many dead 'uns did you knock off last night?' their most
intimate friend would ask, as he would lean over the rails in Rotten
Row, sucking the crook of his cane.
Does this appear exaggerated and libellous?[11] Well, let us look at the
example given by a London leader of fashion and politics as she goes
down at election time to shed sweetness and light around her in Poplar
or Shoreditch.
[Footnote 11: To know how possible this is, look at the women of fashion
at the Cape in this springtime of 1900, with their admirable toilettes,
their lovely false hair, their bird-adorned hats, their picnics and
their dinners and their cheery titter: 'Let us go and see the wounded!'
_vide_ the testimony of Mr Treves, the eminent surgeon.]
In her bonnet is, of course, an osprey aigrette; she knows it was torn
from a living creature, but then that was done far away in some Asiatic
or American creek or forest, and so really does not matter. Her Suede
gloves fit like her skin; they were the skin of a kid, and were probably
stripped from its living body as this lends suppleness to the skin. The
jacket she carries on her arm is lined with Astrakhan fur, which was
taken from an unborn lamb to give to the fur that curl and kink which
please her; it has been cut from its mother's ripped-up womb. Her
horses, as they wait for her at the corner of the street, have their
heads fixed in air, and the muscles of their necks cramped by immovable
bearing-reins. Her Japanese pug runs after her, shaking his
muzzle-tortured nose. She has a telegram in her pocket which has
momentarily vexed her. She sent her sable collie to the dog-exhibition
at Brussels, and the excitement, or the crush, or the want of water, or
something, has brought on heat apoplexy, and they wire that he is dead,
poor old nervous Ossian! She really has no luck, for her Java sparrows
died too at the bird show in Edinburgh, because the footman, sent with
them, forgot to fill their water-glass when it got dry on the journey;
a great many people send birds to shows with nobody at all to take care
of them, so she feels that she was not to blame in the very least.
'Why will you show?' says her husband, who is vexed about Ossian; 'you
don't want to win and you don't want to sell.'
'Oh, everybody does it,' she answers.
He goes into his study to console himself with a new model of a pole
trap; and she, her canvassing done, runs upstairs to see her gown for
the May Drawing-Room. The train is of quite a new design, embroidered
with orchids in natural colours, and fringed with the feathers of the
small green parrakeet, a beautiful little bird which has been poisoned
by hundreds in the jungles of New Guiana to make the border to this
_manteau de cour_.
If she were told that she is a more barbaric creature than the squaw of
the poor Indian trapper who poisoned the parrakeets, she would be
equally astonished and offended.
Let us now look at her next-door neighbour; he is a very wealthy person
and seldom refuses a subscription, thinks private charity pernicious and
pauperising, attends his church regularly, and votes in the House of
Commons in favour of pigeon-shooting and spurious sports. If anyone asks
him if he 'likes animals' he answers cheerily, 'Oh, dear me, yes. Poor
creatures, why not?' But it does not disturb him that the horse in the
hansom cab, which he has called to take him to the City, has weals all
over its loins, and a bit that fills its mouth with blood and foam; nor
does he notice the over-driven and half-starved condition of a herd of
cattle being taken from Cannon Street to Smithfield, but only curses
them heartily for blocking the traffic.
He eats a capon, drives behind a gelding, warms himself at a hearth of
which the coal has been procured by untold sufferings of man and beast,
has his fish crimped, and his lobsters scalded to death, in his
kitchens, relishes the green fat cut from a living turtle, reads with
approbation his head keeper's account of the last pair of owls on his
estate having been successfully trapped, writes to that worthy to turn
down two thousand more young pheasants for the autumn shooting, orders
his agent to have his young cattle on his home-farm dishorned, and buys
as a present for his daughters a card case made from the shell of a
tortoise which was roasted alive, turned on its back on the fire to give
the ruddy glow to its shell. Why not? His favourite preacher and his
popular scientist alike assure him that all the subject races are
properly sacrificed to man. It is obviously wholly impossible to
convince such a person that he is cruel: he merely studies his own
convenience, and he has divine and scientific authority for considering
that he is perfectly right in doing so. He is quite comfortable, both
for time and for eternity. It were easier to change the burglar of the
slums, the brigand of the hills, than to change this self-complacent and
pachydermatous householder who represents nine-tenths of the ruling
classes.
Let us not mistake; he is not personally a cruel man; he would not
himself hurt anything, except in sport which he thinks is legitimate,
and in science which he is told is praiseworthy; he is amiable,
good-natured, perhaps benevolent, but he is wrapped up in habits,
customs, facts, egotisms, tyrannies which all seem to him to be good,
indeed to be essential. His horse is a thing to him like his mail
phaeton; his dog is a dummy, like his umbrella stand; his cattle are
wealth-producing stores, like his timber or wheat; he uses them all as
he requires, as he uses his hats and gloves. He sees no more unkindness
in doing away with any of them than in discarding his old boots, and he
passes the most atrocious laws and by-laws for animal torment as
cheerfully as he signs a cheque payable to self.
His ears are wadded by prejudice, his eyes are blinded by formula, his
character is steeped in egotism; you might as well try, I repeat, to
touch the heart of the Sicilian brigand or the London crib-cracker as to
alter his views and opinions; you would speak to him in a language which
is as unintelligible to his world as Etruscan to the philologist.
The majority of his friends, like himself, lead their short, bustling,
bumptious, and frequently wholly useless lives, purblind always and
entirely deaf where anything except their own interests is concerned.
They think but very rarely of anything except themselves, and the
competitions, ambitions, or jealousies which occupy them. But in their
pastimes cruelty is to them acceptable; it is an outlet for the
barbarian who sleeps in them, heavily drugged but not dead; the sight of
blood titillates agreeably their own slow circulation.
Between them, and the cad who breaks the back of the bagged rabbit,
there is no difference except in the degree of power to indulge the
slaughter-lust.
Alas! it were easier 'to quarry the granite rock with razors' than to
touch the feelings of such as this man, or this woman, where their
vanities, or their mere sheep-like love of doing as others do, are in
question. Princesses wear osprey tufts and lophophorus wings, and so
society wears them too, and cares not a straw by what violence and
wickedness they are procured; as the ladies, who attend their State
concerts, sleep none the worse when in their country houses because the
rabbit screams in the steel gins, and the hawk struggles in the pole
trap, in the woods about their ancestral houses, and have no less
appetite for luncheon amongst the bracken or the heather because shot
and bleeding creatures lie half dead in the game bags around, or because
the stag often is stretched in his dead majesty before their eyes. Why,
then, should they care because in far distant lands little feathered
creatures, lovely as flowers, innocent as the dew and the honey they
feed on, are killed by the thousands and tens of thousands because a
vulgar and depraved taste demands their tender bodies?
What does it matter to them that, through their demands, the bird of
paradise has become so rare that, unless stringent measures be taken at
once, it will be soon totally extinct, and the golden glory of its
plumes will gleam no more in tropical sunlight? What does it matter to
them that the herons in all their various kinds, the osprey, the egret,
the crane, the ibis, are scarcely seen now in the southern and middle
States of America, and, when seen, are no longer together in confident
colonies, as of yore, but nesting singly and in fear? 'Practically all
our heronries are deserted. The birds have been slaughtered for their
plumes,' writes a physician[12] dwelling in the Delaware valley. 'What
were common birds in their season half a century ago are now rarely
seen. The struggle for existence has been a violent one and the herons
have been worsted. Scarcely a word of protest has been heard, and none
that has been effectual.' Women of the world know this, or at least have
been told it fifty times; but it makes no impression on them. They will
wear osprey-aigrettes as long as any are left in commerce, and they
think a humming-bird looks so pretty in their hair. What else matters?
[Footnote 12: Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D.]
That their example is copied by the women of the middle classes with
swallows and warblers, and by the servant girl and factory girl with
dyed sparrows and finches, makes no impression on them; if the fact be
noticed to them they say that the common people always will be
ridiculous, and stop their carriage in Bond Street to buy fire-screens
made of owls, or an electric lamp hung in the beak of a stuffed
flamingo.
Why should they care, indeed!--they who walk with the guns, even if they
do not do more and secure a warm corner for their own shot; they who
bring up their young sons to regard the cowardly and brutal sport of
battue-shooting as the supreme pleasure and privilege of youth, and see
unmoved their beautiful autumnal woods turned into slaughter-places?
One cannot but reflect how different might the world have been if women
had been different in mind and temper; if, instead of their smiling,
self-complacent tittering approbation of brutality, they had shown
scorn for and abhorrence of brutality. They clamour for electoral rights
and leave all this vast field of influence unoccupied and untilled! They
do little or nothing to soften the hearts or refine the feelings of the
men who love them, or to bring up their children in any sympathy with
animal life. Sport has become fashionable with them in the last twenty
years, and the crack shot in the coverts of Chantilly this winter was a
woman. Sporting clothes, breeches and gaiters, are now a recognised part
of the fashionable woman's toilet.
I would not affirm (anomaly as it appears) that the pursuit of sport
cannot co-exist with a love of animals, for I have known many sporting
men and hunting men who were in a sense sincerely devoted to some
animals. But sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could
take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its
pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men,
because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue
at all; and it is impossible for the sportswoman logically and
effectively to exercise any influence on her young children which could
incline them to mercy--such an influence as Lamartine's mother had on
him to the day of his death.
There are two periods in the life of a woman when she is almost
omnipotent for good or ill. These are when men are in love with her;
and, again, when her children are young enough to be left entirely to
her and to those whom she selects to control them. How many women in ten
thousand use this unlimited power which they then possess to breathe
the quality of mercy into the souls of those who for the time are as wax
in their hands? They will crowd into the Speaker's Box to applaud
debates which concern them in no way. They will impertinently force
their second-hand opinions on Jack and Jill in the village or in the
City alleys. They will go on to platforms and sing comic songs, or
repeat temperance platitudes, and think they are a great moral force in
the improvement of the masses. This they will do, because it amuses them
and makes them of importance. But alter their own lives, abandon their
own favourite cruelties, risk the sneer of society, or lead their little
children to the love of nature and the tenderness of pity; these they
will never do. Mercy is not in them, nor humility, nor sympathy.
Can written words do anything to touch the hearts of those who read? I
fear not.
On how many do written words, even dipped in the heart's blood and
burning with the soul's fire, produce any lasting effect? Is not the
most eloquent voice doomed to cry without echo in the wilderness? And
what wilderness is there so barren as the desert of human indifference
and of human egotism?
Pity is only awakened in those who are already pitiful. We cannot sow
mustard seed on granite. The whole tendency of the age is towards
cynicism, indifference, self-engrossment. The small children sneer much
more often than they smile.
From Plutarch to Voltaire, from Celsus to Sir Arthur Helps, the finest
and most earnest pleading against cruelty has been made by the finest
and most logical minds. But the world has not listened; the majority of
men and women are neither just nor generous, neither fine nor logical.
In a few generations more, there will probably be no room at all allowed
for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An
immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have
passed away the last smile of the world's youth. For in the future the
human race will have no tenderness for those of its own kind who are
feeble or aged, and will consign to lethal chambers all those who weary
it, obstruct it, or importune it: since the quality of mercy will day by
day be more derided, and less regarded, as one of the moral attributes
of mankind.