CRUELTY.—Sometimes it has seemed to me that cruelty is the climate of crime, and that generosity is the Spring, Summer and Autumn of virtue. Every form of wickedness, of meanness, springs from selfishness, that is to say, from cruelty. Every good man hates and despises the wretch who abuses wife and child—who rules by curses and blows and makes his home a kind of hell. So, no generous man wishes to associate with one who overworks his horse and feeds the lean and fainting beast with blows.
The barbarian delights in inflicting pain. He loves to see his victim bleed,—but the civilized man staunches blood, binds up wounds and decreases pain. He pities the suffering animal as well as the suffering man.
He would no more inflict wanton wounds upon a dog than on a man. The heart of the civilized man speaks for the dumb and helpless.
A good man would no more think of flaying a living animal than of murdering his mother. The man who cuts a hoof from the leg of a horse is capable of committing any crime that does not require courage. Such an experiment can be of no use. Under no circumstances are hoofs taken from horses for the good of the horses any more than their heads would be cut off.
Think of the pain inflicted by separating the hoof of a living horse from the flesh! If the poor beast could speak what would he say? The same knowledge could be obtained by cutting away the hoof of a dead horse. Knowledge of every bone, ligament, artery and vein, of every cartilage and joint can be obtained by the dissection of the dead. "But," says the biologist, "we must dissect the living."
Well, millions of living animals have been cut in pieces; millions of experiments have been tried; all the nerves have been touched; every possible agony has been inflicted that ingenuity could invent and cruelty accomplish. Many volumes have been published filled with accounts of these experiments, giving all the details and the results. People who are curious about such things can read these reports. There is no need of repeating these savage experiments. It is now known how long a dog can live with all the pores of his skin closed, how long he can survive the loss of his skin, or one lobe of his brain, or both of his kidneys, or part of his intestines, or without his liver, and there is no necessity of mutilating and mangling thousands of other dogs to substantiate what is already known.
Of what possible use is it to know just how long an animal can live without water—at what time he becomes insane from thirst, or blind or deaf?
THE WORLD'S FAIR will do great good. A great many thousand people of the Old World will for the first time understand the new; will for the first time appreciate what a free people can do. For the first time they will know the value of free institutions, of individual independence, of a country where people express their thoughts, are not afraid of each other, not afraid to try—a people so accustomed to success that disaster is not taken into calculation. Of course, we have great advantages. We have a new half of the world. We have soil better than is found in other countries, and the soil is new and generous and anxious to be cultivated. So we have everything in hill and mountain that man can need—silver, and gold, and iron beyond computation—and, in addition to all that, our people are the most inventive. We sustain about the same relation to invention that Italy in her palmy days did to art, or that Spain did to superstition.