to be of any material consequence, on the score of interest, how grossly they may be abused; and their tormentors seem delighted with this release from all restraint on their dispositions. Those dispositions, as indulged in some instances, when the miserable creatures are formally consigned to be destroyed, cannot be much exceeded by anything we can attribute to fiends. Some horrid exemplifications were adduced, not as single casual circumstances, but as usual practices, by a patriotic senator some years since, in endeavoring to obtain a legislative enactment in mitigation of the sufferings of the brute tribes. The design vanished to nothing in the House of Commons, under the effect of argument and ridicule from a person distinguished for intellectual cultivation; whose resistance was not only against that specific measure, but avowedly against the principle itself on which _any_ measure of the same tendency could ever be founded. [Footnote: Lord Erskine's memorable Bill, triumphantly scouted by the late Mr. Windham.--Undoubtedly there are considerable difficulties in the way of legislation on the subject; but an equal share of difficulty attending some other subjects--an affair of revenue, for instance, or a measure for the suppression (at that time) of political opinion--would soon have been overcome.] Nor could any victory have pleased him better, probably, than one which contributed to prolong the barbarism of the people, as the best security, he deemed, for their continuing fit to labor at home and fight abroad. It might have added to this gratification to hear (as was the fact) his name pronounced with delight by ruffians of all classes, who regarded him as their patron saint. If any one should be inclined to interpose here with a remark, that after _such_ a reference, we have little right to ascribe to those classes, as if it were peculiarly one of their characteristics, the insensibility to the sufferings of the brute creation, and to number it formally among the results of the "lack of knowledge," we can only reply, that however those of higher order may explode any attempt to make the most efficient authority of the nation bear repressively upon the evil, and however it may in other ways be abetted by them, it is, at any rate, in those inferior classes chiefly that the actual perpetrators of it are found. It is something to say in favor of cultivation, that it does, generally speaking, render those who have the benefit of it incapable of practising, _themselves_, the most palpably flagrant of these cruelties which they may be virtually countenancing, by some things which they do, and some things which they omit or refuse to do. Mr. Windham would not himself have practised a wanton barbarity on a poor horse or ass, though he scouted any legislative attempt to prevent it among his inferiors. * * * * *