confess that it has been very little. During the periods, and in the countries, in which theological influence was supreme, they were unchallenged.(381) They disappeared(382) at last, because a luxurious and industrial civilisation involved a refinement of manners; because a fastidious taste recoiled with a sensation of disgust from pleasures that an uncultivated taste would keenly relish; because the drama, at once reflecting and accelerating the change, gave a new form to popular amusements, and because, in consequence of this revolution, the old pastimes, being left to the dregs of society, became the occasions of scandalous disorders.(383) In Protestant countries the clergy have, on the whole, sustained this movement. In Catholic countries it has been much more faithfully represented by the school of Voltaire and Beccaria. A judicious moralist may, however, reasonably question whether amusements which derive their zest from a display of the natural ferocious instincts of animals, and which substitute death endured in the frenzy of combat for death in the remote slaughter-house or by the slow process of decay, have added in any appreciable degree to the sum of animal misery, and in these cases he will dwell less upon the suffering inflicted than upon the injurious influence the spectacle may sometimes exercise on the character of the spectator. But there are forms of cruelty which must be regarded in a different light. The horrors of vivisection, often so wantonly, so needlessly practised,(384) the prolonged and atrocious tortures, sometimes inflicted in order to procure some gastronomic delicacy, are so far removed from the public gaze that they exercise little influence on the character of men. Yet no humane man can reflect upon them without a shudder. To bring these things within the range of ethics, to create the notion of duties towards the animal world, has, so far as Christian countries are concerned, been one of the peculiar merits of the last century, and, for the most part, of Protestant nations. However fully we may recognise the humane spirit transmitted to the world in the form of legends from the saints of the desert, it must not be forgotten that the inculcation of humanity to animals on a wide scale is mainly the work of a recent and a secular age; that the Mohammedans and the Brahmins have in this sphere considerably surpassed the Christians, and that Spain and Southern Italy, in which Catholicism has most deeply planted its roots, are even now, probably beyond all other countries in Europe, those in which inhumanity to animals is most wanton and most unrebuked.