Mr. Nicholas Smith, while United States consul at Liege, wrote, or
caused to be written, an official report, wickedly, wilfully and
maliciously designed to abridge the privileges, augment the ills
and impair the honorable status of the domestic dog. In the very
beginning of this report Mr. Smith manifests his animus by stigmatizing
the domestic dog as an “hereditary loafer;” and having “hurled the
allegation,” affirms “the dawn of a (Belgian) new era” wherein the
pampered menial will loaf no more. There is to be no more sun-soaking
on door mats having a southern exposure, no more usurpation of the
warmest segment of the family semicircle, no more personal solicitation
of cheer at the domestic board. The dog’s place in the social scale
is no longer to be determined by considerations of sentiment, but will
be the result of cold commercial calculation, and so fixed as best to
serve the ends of industrial expediency. All this in Belgium, where
the dog is already in active service as a beast of burden and draught;
doubtless the transition to that humble condition from his present and
immemorial social elevation in less advanced countries will be slow and
characterized by bitter factional strife. America, especially, although
ever accessible to the infection of new and profitable ideas, will be
slow to accept so radical a subversion of a social superstructure that
almost may be said to rest upon the domestic dog as a basic verity.
The dogs are our only true “leisure class” (even our tramps are
sometimes compelled to engage in such simple industries as are possible
in the county jail) and we are justly proud of them. Dogs toil not,
neither spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not a dog. Instead of
making them hewers of wood and drawers of water, it would be more
consonant with the Anglomaniacal and general Old World spirit, now
so dominant in the councils of the nation, to make them “hereditary
legislators.” And Mr. Smith must permit me to add, with a special
significance, that history records an instance of even a horse making a
fairly good consul.
Mr. Smith avers with obvious satisfaction that in Liege twice as many
draught dogs as horses are seen in the streets, attached to vehicles.
He regards “a gaily painted cart” drawn by “a well fed dog” and driven
by a well fed (and gaily painted) woman as a “pleasing vision.” I do
not; I should prefer to see the dog sitting at the receipt of steaks
and chops and the lady devoting herself to the amelioration of the
condition of the universe and the manufacture of poetry and stories
that are not true. A more pleasing vision, too, one endeared to eye
and heart by immemorial use and wont, is that of stranger and dog
indulging in the pleasures of the chase—stranger a little ahead—while
the woman in the case manifests a characteristically compassionate
solicitude lest the gentleman’s trousers do not match Fido’s mustache.
It is, indeed, impossible to regard with any degree of approval the
degradation to commercial utility of two so noble animals as Dog and
Woman; and if Man had joined them together by driving-reins I should
hope that God would put them asunder, even if the reins were held
by Dog. There would no doubt be a distinct gain as well as a certain
artistic fitness in unyoking the strong-minded female of our species
from the chariot of progress and yoking her to the apple-cart or
fish-wagon, but imminence of the draughtwoman is not foreshadowed in
the report of our consul at Liege.
Mr. Smith’s estimate of the number of dogs in this country at seven
millions is a moderate one, it must be confessed, and can hardly have
been based on observations by moonlight in a suburban village; his
estimate of the effective strength of the average dog at five hundred
pounds is probably about right, as will be attested by any intelligent
boy who in a campaign against an orchard has experienced detention by
the Cerberus of the place. Taking his own figures, Mr. Smith calculates
that we have in this country three-and-a-half billion pounds of “idle
dog power.” But this statement is more ingenious than ingenuous; it
gives, as doubtless it was intended to give, the impression that we
have only idle dogs, whereas of all mundane forces the domestic dog is
most easily stirred to action. His expense of energy in pursuit of the
harmless, necessary flea, for example, is prodigious; and he is not
infrequently seen in chase of his own tail, with an activity scarcely
inferior. If there is anything worth while in accepted theories of the
conversion and conservation of force these gigantic energies are by no
means wasted; they reappear as heat, light and electricity, modifying
climate, reducing gas bills and assisting in propulsion of street cars.
Even in baying the moon and terrifying visitors and bypassers, the dog
releases a certain amount of vibratory force which through various
mutations of its wave-length may do its part in cooking a steak or
gratifying the olfactory nerve by throwing fresh perfume on the violet.
Evidently the commercial advantages of deposing the dog from his
position of Exalted Personage and subduing him to that of Motor would
not be all clear gain. He would no longer have the spirit to send,
Whitmanwise, his barbarous but beneficent yawp over the housetops,
nor the leisure to throw off vast quantities of energy by centrifugal
efforts at the conquest of his tail. As to the fleas, he would accept
them with apathetic satisfaction as preventives of thought upon his
fallen fortunes.
Having observed with attention and considered with seriousness, a
respectable authority declares his conviction that the dog, as we have
the happiness to know him, is dreadfully bored by civilization. This
is one of the gravest accusations that the friends of progress and
light have been called out to meet—a challenge that it is impossible to
ignore and unprofitable to evade; for the dog as we have the happiness
to know him is the only dog that we have the happiness really to know.
The wolf is hardly a dog within the meaning of the law, nor is the
scalp-yielding coyote, whether he howls or merely sings and plays the
piano; moreover, these are beyond the pale of civilization and outside
the scope of our sympathies.
With the dog it is different. His place is among us; he is with us and
of us—a part of our life and love. If we are maintaining and promoting
a condition of things that fatigues him it is befitting that we mend
our ways lest, shaking the carpet dust from his feet and the tenderloin
steaks from his teeth, he depart from our midst and connect himself
with the enchanted life of the thrilling barbarian. We can not afford
to lose him. The cynophobes may call him a “survival” and sneer at his
exhausted mandate—albeit, as Darwin points out, they are indebted for
their sneer to his own habit of uncovering his teeth to bite; they
may seek to cast opprobrium upon the nature of our affection for him
by pronouncing it hereditary—a bequest from our primitive ancestors,
for whom he performed important service in other ways than depriving
visitors of their tendons; but quite the same we should miss him at
his meal time and in the (but for him) silent watches of the night.
We should miss his bark and his bite, the feel of his forefeet upon
our shirt-fronts, the frou-frou of his dusty sides against our nether
habiliments. More than all, we should miss and mourn that visible
yearning for chops and steaks, which he has persuaded us to accept as
the lovelight of his eye and a tribute to our personal worth. We must
keep the dog, and to that end find means to abate his weariness of us
and our ways.
Doubtless much might be done to reclaim our dogs from their uncheerful
state of mind by abstention from debate on the protective tariff;
by excluding them from the churches, at least during the sermons;
by keeping them off the streets and out of hearing when rites of
prostration are in performance before visiting notables; by forbidding
anyone to read aloud in their hearing the more phrenetic articles in
the newspapers, and by educating them to the belief that labor and
capital are illusions. A limitation of the annual output of popular
novels would undoubtedly reduce the dejection, which could be still
further mitigated by abolition of the more successful magazines. If
the dialect story or poem could be prohibited, under severe penalties,
the sum of night-howling (erroneously attributed to lunar influence)
would experience an audible decrement, which, also, would enable the
fire department to augment its own uproar without reproach. There
is, indeed, a considerable number of ways in which we might effect a
double reform—promoting the advantage of Man, as well as medicating the
mental fatigue of Dog. For another example, it would be “a boon and a
blessing to men” if society would put to death, or at least banish, the
millman or manufacturer who persists in apprising the entire community
many times a day by means of a steam whistle that it is time for his
oppressed employees (every one of whom has a gold watch) to go to work
or to leave off. Such things not only make a dog tired, they make a
man mad. They answer with an accented affirmative Truthful James’s
plaintive inquiry,
Is civilization a failure,
Or is the Caucasian played out?
Unquestionably, from his advantageous point of view as a looker-on at
the game, the dog is justified in the conviction that they are.