For the present, however, what is most urgently needed is some comprehensive and intelligible principle, which shall indicate, in a more consistent manner, the true lines of man’s moral relation towards the lower animals. Hitherto even the leading advocates of animals’ rights seem to have shrunk from basing their claim on the only argument which can ultimately be held to be a sufficient one--the assertion that animals, as well as men, though, of course, to a far less extent than men, are possessed of a distinctive individuality, and therefore are in justice entitled to live their lives with a due measure of that “restricted freedom” to which Herbert Spencer alludes. It is of little use to claim “rights” for animals in a vague general way, if with the same breath we explicitly show our determination to subordinate those rights to anything and everything that can be construed into a human “want”; nor will it ever be possible to obtain full justice for the lower races so long as we continue to regard them as beings of a wholly different order, and to ignore the significance of their numberless points of kinship with mankind. For example, it has been said by a well-known writer on the subject of humanity to animals[7] that “the life of a brute, having no moral purpose, can best be understood ethically as representing the sum of its _pleasures_; and the obligation, therefore, of producing the pleasures of sentient creatures must be reduced, in their case, to the abstinence from unnecessary destruction of life.” Now, with respect to this statement, I must say that the notion of the life of an animal having “no moral purpose” belongs to a class of ideas which cannot possibly be accepted by the advanced humanitarian thought of the present day--it is a purely arbitrary assumption, at variance with our best science, and absolutely fatal (if the subject be clearly thought out) to any full realization of animals’ rights. If we are ever going to do justice to the lower races, we must get rid of the antiquated notion of a “great gulf” fixed between them and mankind, and must recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood. As far as any excuses can be alleged, in explanation of the insensibility or inhumanity of the western nations in their treatment of animals, these excuses may be mostly traced back to one or the other of two theories, wholly different in origin, yet alike in this--that both postulate an absolute difference of nature between men and the lower kinds.