Nor need we be at all disconcerted by the derisive inquiries of our antagonists as to the final outcome of such theories. “There is some reason to hope,” said the author of the ironical “Vindication of the Rights of Brutes,” “that this essay will soon be followed by treatises on the rights of vegetables and minerals, and that thus the doctrine of perfect equality will become universal.” To which suggestion we need only answer, “Perhaps.” It is for each age to initiate its own ethical reforms, according to the light and sensibility of its own instincts; further and more abstruse questions, at present insoluble, may safely be left to the more mature judgment of posterity. The human conscience furnishes the safest and simplest indicator in these matters. We know that certain acts of injustice affect us as they did not affect our forefathers--it is our duty to set these right. It is not our duty to agitate problems, which, at the present date, excite no unmistakable moral feeling. The humane instinct will assuredly continue to develop. And it should be observed that to advocate the rights of animals is far more than to plead for compassion or justice towards the victims of ill-usage; it is not only, and not primarily, for the sake of the victims that we plead, but for the sake of mankind itself. Our true civilization, our race-progress, our _humanity_ (in the best sense of the term) are concerned in this development; it is ourselves, our own vital instincts, that we wrong, when we trample on the rights of the fellow-beings, human or non-human, over whom we chance to hold jurisdiction. This most important point is constantly overlooked by the opponents of humanitarian reform. They labour, unsuccessfully enough, to minimize the complaints of animals’ wrongs, on the plea that these wrongs, though great, are not so great as they are represented to be, and that in any case it is not possible, or not urgently desirable, for man to alleviate them. As if _human_ interests also were not intimately bound up in every such compassionate endeavour! And this brings us back to the moral of the whole matter. The idea of Humanity is no longer confined to man; it is beginning to extend itself to the lower animals, as in the past it has been gradually extended to savages and slaves. “Behold the animals. There is not one but the human soul lurks within it, fulfilling its destiny as surely as within you.” So writes the author of “Towards Democracy”; and what has long been felt by the poet is now being scientifically corroborated by the anthropologist and philosopher. “The standpoint of modern thought,” says Büchner,[44] “no longer recognizes in animals a difference of kind, but only a difference of degree, and sees the principle of intelligence developing through an endless and unbroken series.” It is noteworthy that, on this point, evolutionary science finds itself in agreement with oriental tradition.