But how is this vast educational change to be inaugurated? Like all far-reaching reforms which are promoted by a few believers in the face of the public indifference, it can only be carried through by the energy and resolution of its supporters. The efforts which the various humane societies are now making in special directions, each concentrating its attack on a particular abuse, must be supplemented and strengthened by a crusade--an intellectual, literary, and social crusade--against the central cause of oppression, viz.: the disregard of the natural kinship between man and the animals, and the consequent denial of their rights. We must insist on having the whole question fully considered and candidly discussed, and must no longer permit its most important issues to be shirked because it does not suit the convenience or the prejudices of comfortable folk to give attention to them. Above all, the sense of ridicule that at present attaches to the supposed “sentimentalism” of an advocacy of animals’ rights must be faced and swept away. The fear of this absurd charge deprives the cause of humanity of many workers who would otherwise lend their aid, and accounts in part for the unduly diffident and apologetic tone which is too often adopted by humanitarians. We must meet this ridicule, and retort it without hesitation on those to whom it properly pertains. The laugh must be turned against the true “cranks” and “crotchet-mongers”--the noodles who can give no wiser reason for the infliction of suffering on animals than that it is “better for the animals themselves”--the flesh-eaters who labour under the pious belief that animals were “sent” to us as food--the silly women who imagine that the corpse of a bird is a becoming article of head-gear--the half-witted sportsmen who vow that the vigour of the English race is dependent on the practice of fox-hunting--and the half-enlightened scientists who are unaware that vivisection has moral and spiritual, no less than physical, consequences. That many of our arguments are mere superficial sword-play, and do not touch the profound emotional sympathies on which the cause of humanity rests, is a fact which does not lessen their controversial significance. For this is a case where those who take the sword shall perish by the sword; and the clever men-of-the-world who twit consistent humanitarians with sentimentality may perhaps discover that they themselves--fixed as they are in an ambiguous and utterly untenable position--are the sickliest sentimentalists of all.