Regardless of their plaints,”
and who has denounced with so eloquent indignation the pitiless wars “waged with defenceless innocence,” and the protean shapes of human selfishness, should yet have stopped short of the final cause of them all, would be inexplicable but for the blinding influence of habit and authority. Nevertheless, his picture of the savagery of the Slaughter-House, and of some of its associated cruelties, is too forcible to be omitted:
“To make him sport,
To justify the phrensy of his wrath,
Or his base gluttony, are causes good
And just, in his account, why bird and beast
Should suffer torture, and the stream be dyed
With blood of their inhabitants impaled.
Earth groans beneath the burden of a war
Waged with defenceless Innocence: while he,