Contrast with that the following, taken at random from among my newspaper cuttings (it is a paragraph from the Morning Post):
June 14, 1904.
“The Carlisle Otter Hounds met at Longtown yesterday, and had the best hunt that has taken place in the Esk for fifty years. A splendid otter was put up at Red Scaur, and for four hours he kept men, hounds, and terriers at bay. He left the river several times for the woods and rocks, and ran the woods as cunningly as a fox. Eventually, when climbing a steep rock for a hole, he fell back exhausted into the water, and the hounds despatched him. His body was presented to Sir Richard Graham.”
No thought of pity here for the poor wild creature, hunted, harried, and remorselessly pursued by men and hounds for four mortal hours—in water, through woods, over rocks, ever flying in all the agony of fear, till the last dregs of strength are exhausted, and, on the very threshold of the longed-for refuge, he falls, hopeless and helpless, in the stream, where “the hounds despatched him.” Such is a “grand otter hunt,” the best that had taken place in the Esk for fifty years! Truly we may smile at those holy men of the Buddhists who carried bells on their shoes in order to give warning as they walked to the little creatures in the long grass; but for my part I own that, upon the whole, I would far sooner be classed with these poor sentimentalists, who have seen in their hearts the coming of that “milder day” for which the great poet who sang of “Hartleap Well” so devoutly longed, than with that flower of muscular Christianity, the stalwart Britisher, so distinguished for his love of sport and his contempt for pain—his own generally excepted!
How, then, stands this question of sport considered as a question of ethics? A great German thinker, as we all know, believed that he had found the very basis of morality in the sacred instinct of compassion. I will not argue whether Schopenhauer was right or wrong in that contention, but this, at any rate, we must all admit—namely, that without compassion all our boasted morality would be but as sounding brass and as a tinkling cymbal. Nay, whether it be or be not the basis of morality, this at least is true that, without compassion, no morality worth having could exist at all.
Let us listen for a moment to Rousseau on this matter:
“Mandeville was right in thinking that, with all their systems of morality, men would never have been anything but monsters if Nature had not given them compassion to support their reason; but he failed to see that from this one quality spring all the social virtues which he was unwilling to credit mankind with. In reality, what is generosity, clemency, humanity, if not compassion, applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human race as a whole? Even benevolence and friendship, if we look at the matter rightly, are seen to result from a constant compassion, directed upon a particular object; for to desire that someone should not suffer is nothing else than to desire that he should be happy.… The more closely the living spectator identifies himself with the living sufferer, the more active does pity become.”
And again:
“How is it that we let ourselves be moved to pity if not by getting out of our own consciousness, and becoming identified with the living sufferer; by leaving, so to say, our own being and entering into his? We do not suffer except as we suppose he suffers; it is not in us, it is in him, that we suffer.… Offer a young man objects on which the expansive force of his heart can act—objects such as may enlarge his nature, and incline it to go out to other beings, in whom he may everywhere find himself again. Keep carefully away those things which narrow his view, and make him self-centred, and tighten the strings of the human ego.”