“Me brethren the doying Christian lepps into the arrums of Death and makes his hollow jaws ring with eternal hallelujahs!”
I have myself heard another read the concluding chapters of the gospels, substituting with extraordinary effect the words “two Meal-factors,” for the “two malefactors,” who were crucified. There was a chapter in the Acts which we dreaded to hear, so difficult was it to help laughing when we were told of “Perthians and Mades, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia and the parts of Libya about Cyraine, streengers of Roum, Jews and Proselytes, Crates and Arabians.” It was also hard to listen gravely to a vivid description of Jonah’s catastrophe, as I have heard it, thus: “The weves bate against the ship, and the ship bate against the weves;” (and, at last) “The Wheel swallowed Jonah!”
They had a difficult place to hold, these humbler Irish clergymen, properly associating with no class of their parishioners; but to their credit be it said, they were nearly all men of blameless lives, who did their duty as they understood it, fairly well. The disestablishment of the Irish Church which I had regarded beforehand with much prejudice, did (I have since been inclined to think), very little mischief, and certainly awakened in the minds of the Irish squirearchy who had to settle their creed afresh, an interest in theology which was never exhibited in my earlier days. I was absolutely astounded on paying a visit to my old home a few years after disestablishment and while the Convention (commonly called the Contention!) was going on, to hear sundry recondite mysteries discussed at my brother’s table and to find some of my old dancing partners actually greedily listening to what I could tell them of the then recent discovery of Mr. Edmund Ffoulkes,—that the doctrine of the Double Procession of the Holy Ghost had been invented by King Reccared.
As regards any moral obligation or duty owed by men and women to the lower animals, such ideas were as yet scarcely beginning to be recognised. It was in 1822, the year in which I was born, that brave old Richard Martin carried in Parliament the first Act ever passed by any legislature in the world on behalf of the brutes. Tom Moore had laughed at this early Zoophilist.
“Place me midst O’Rourkes, O’Tooles,
The ragged royal blood of Tara!
Place me where Dick Martin rules
The houseless wilds of Connemara
But in the history of human civilisation, “Martin’s Act” will hereafter assuredly hold a distinct place of honour when many a more pompous political piece of legislation is buried in oblivion. For a long time the new law, and the Society for Prevention of Cruelty which arose to work it, were objects of obloquy and jest even from such a man as Sydney Smith, who did his best in the Edinburgh Review to sneer them down. But by degrees they formed, as Mr. Lecky says every system of legislation must do, a system of moral education. A sense of the Rights of Animals has slowly been awakened, and is becoming, by not imperceptible degrees, a new principle of ethics. In my youth there were plenty of good people who were fond of dogs, cats and horses; but nothing in their behaviour, or in that of any one I knew at that time, testified to the existence of any latent idea that it was morally wrong to maltreat animals to any extent. Pious sportsmen were wont to scourge their dogs with frightful dog-whips, for any disobedience or mistake, with a savage violence which I shudder to remember; and which I do not think the most brutal men would now exhibit openly. Miss Edgeworth’s then recent novel of Ennui had described her hero as riding five horses to death to give himself a sensation, without (as it would appear) forfeiting in the author’s opinion his claims to the sympathies of the reader. I can myself recall only laughing, not crying as I should be more inclined to do now, at the spectacle of miserable half-starved horses made to gallop in Irish cars to win a bribe for the driver, who flogged them over ruts and stones, shouting (as I have heard them) “Never fare! I’ll batther him out of that!” The picture of a “Rosinante,” from Cervantes’ time till a dozen or two years ago, instead of being one of the most pathetic objects in the world,—the living symbol of human cruelty,—was always considered a particularly laughable caricature. Only tender-hearted Bewick in his woodcut, Waiting for Death, tried to move the hearts of his generation to compassion for the starved and worn-out servant of ungrateful man.
The Irish peasantry do not habitually maltreat animals, but the frightful mutilations and tortures which of late years they have practised on cattle belonging to their obnoxious neighbours, is one of the worst proofs of the existence in the Celtic character of that undercurrent of ferocity of which I have spoken elsewhere.