A recent writer has told us that he cannot believe that good will follow from the wilful destruction by man of Nature’s greatest and most beautiful production--a living thing. He poses as a sentimentalist and seems to regard it as the indication of a superior and gentle mind to refuse to sanction the removal or even the temporary discomfort of what Nature has called into life. I, too, claim to be a sentimentalist, but the sentiment which thrills me is one of revolt against the needless and remediable suffering of all humanity--suffering which man has brought on himself by his stumbling, half-hearted resistance to Nature’s drastic method of purifying and strengthening the race, her remorseless slaughter of the unfit. It is this suffering which some would allow their fellow-men still to endure, now and for generations to come, rather than have their own tranquillity disturbed by the record of that modicum of immediate pain and sacrifice of animal life which is the price of freedom for mankind from far greater pain hereafter. We have to learn to mitigate and to minimise pain, not to run away from it. It is childish to weep over the distortion and destruction of Nature’s products by man’s violence and ignorance. What we can and should do is to see that our dealings with this fair earth and its living freight are guided not by vain regret, but by knowledge and foresight. THE END R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BREAD ST. HILL, E.C., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. * * * * * Transcriber’s Notes: Punctuation has been made consistent. Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have been corrected. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of From an Easy Chair, by Ray Lankester