“Who says no? The peas were alive. I plucked their pods, tearing the graceful vines to pieces limb by limb, and the pea plants died—killed—murdered. Certainly I planted them and saved their lives when they were tender, sprouting, infantile pea-lings by killing the invading slugs with salt and soot, but, though I murdered that they might live, there was no reason why I should slay them when mature. But it is so all through man’s career, he walks his ground—his little Eden—a very Cain. Say he conquers that terrible disinclination to follow the example of the old man Adam, and till the ground with a spade, a genial kind of toil that opens the pores of the skin, increases the appetite with the smell of the newly-turned earth, and gives such an awful aching pain in the back that a quarter of an hour’s usance is quite sufficient digging for any but an extremely greedy man who possesses an enormous digestion. I repeat, say he conquers his aversion to manual toil, he has not inserted the deadly blade eight inches, and turned up the ‘spit,’ as the gardeners call it, before he finds that he has chopped some wretched wriggling worm in two. The worm had no business to be there when he was digging. Why not? What does the worm know about human rights? His name is not Macgregor, and he has no feet to be upon his native heath, but he was in his native soil. He was born there, and had gone on pleasantly boring his way through life, coming up to the surface as soon as it was dark, and lying out on the cool, dewy, fragrant earth, and then you, because you want potatoes, or peas, or some other vegetable for your gluttonous maw, come and cut him in two. A judge in a court of law would go against the worm, and call it justifiable vermicide, as he was a trespasser, you legally holding the land, but that worm’s blood would still be upon your—spade.
“There is no begging the question; if you garden you must kill wholesale. There is only one alternative. You can throw the big nuisances over into your neighbour’s plot, but it is only a temporary palliation, for he is sure not to like it, and certain to throw them back. Besides, you may have some compunction in the matter, and as the small nuisances cannot be thrown over, one kills and slays wholesale. It is terrible to think of! Intentionally and unintentionally one slays millions of creatures a year, beginning with one’s beef, and going down to the tiniest aphis that one treads upon in one’s daily walk, so that if it is wicked to kill slugs, it must be equally unjust to slay the tiniest fly. Why it is quite appalling, this reckoning up of crime. Those calceolarias were covered with lovely little green-flies right up the blossom stalks, and without compunction there was a massacre of the insects with tobacco water. That croquet lawn was infested with great worms, and they were watered with solution of copperas to crawl out and die. The great shelled snails that made a raid by regiments upon the strawberry beds were supplied with pillars of salt. The birds after much forbearance, were condemned to death for stealing cherries and black and red currants and gooseberries; so were the rabbits for nibbling off the tops of the tender broccoli and Brussels sprout plants. As a romantic young lady would say, this garden has been literally stained with gore, but the gore does not show, and the garden is the more abundant and green for the removal of its plagues.
“Yes, there is the creephole left that the killing may be looked upon as in defence of one’s own. The worm may be indigenous, but the birds and flies invade the place, while the slugs, snails, and rodents come in through fence and wall. They attack one’s cherished plants, and, granting that those plants have life, why should they not be protected, as one’s poultry is from foxes, and their young from predatory cats? Naturalists grant plants to possess life, circulation, sleep, functions, and nerves; they grow, they blossom, they have young; they have endless contrivances for sending those young emigrating to a distance where they can get a living for themselves, and not bother and eat the nutriment of the old folks, who are, perhaps, in pinched circumstances. Some send their offspring flying upon little parachutes of their own; some artfully stick them upon the backs or sides of any animal who passes by; there is one great balsam which sits on a sunny day apparently taking aim with its little seeds, and shooting them out with a loud pop to a considerable distance; some youngsters really possess locomotion, and contract and expand in quite a crawling way till they get to some distance from the parent stem; others, again, take advantage of the first rain flood, and these little ones are off to sea, merrily sailing along hundreds of yards from where they were born. Why, even in the wood, at the bottom of the garden, there is one umbelliferous plant, a kind of wild parsnip—‘hog weed,’ as it is locally called—which grows up in a summer nine and ten feet high, carrying a host of children upon its head like a Covent Garden porter with a basket, till it thinks they are big enough to take care of themselves, when it calmly lies down, and tilts the little seeds off three or four yards away from its roots to form an independent nursery.
“I cannot solve the problem whether it is cruel to slay slugs, but take refuge in the protection theory, and so, as in duty bound, we go on killing and slaying, setting traps of sugared water for the wasps that love the plums, picking off the crawling caterpillars, before they have time to bloom into butterflies, drowning aphides with syringe storms, enlisting toads to kill the wood-lice and beetles, and full of remorse for what we do, go on in our wicked ways. To take a step outside one’s garden, though, and gaze in thought around this teeming earth, what a vast scheme of preying destruction and bursting forth into new life is always going on. Those words, destruction and cruelty, might almost be expunged as being absurd in their broadest sense, for, in spite of the sore problem, it seems that from man downward to the tiniest microscopic organism, the great aim of existence is an exemplification of the verb ‘to prey.’”
Jack Scales in his musings had been pretty well round the garden, and had returned to where Aunt Sophia was still killing slugs.
She looked up as he approached and seemed about to speak, so he resolved to give her the opportunity, and going up he said with a smile, “Do you know Miss Raleigh, I have been musing on killing slugs, and I think yours is a very notable employment.”
“Humph!” ejaculated the old lady, stopping short, and looking the doctor full in the face.—“And now, doctor, a word with you as a gentleman. You are here in constant attendance upon my nephew. He has a good deal of property and that sort of thing, but I don’t think it ought to be wasted.”
“Of course not, my dear madam.”
“Are you doing James any good?”
The doctor opened his eyes a little more widely at this, and then said: “Well, that is a very plain question, Miss Raleigh; but I’ll give you a plain answer—So far, none.”