“There is nothing that revolts our moral sense so much as cruelty. Every other offence we can pardon, but not cruelty. The reason is found in the fact that cruelty is the exact opposite of _compassion_--viz., the direct participation, independent of all ulterior considerations, in the sufferings of another, leading to sympathetic assistance in the effort to prevent or remove them; whereon, in the last resort, all satisfaction and all well-being and happiness depend. It is this compassion alone which is the real basis of all _voluntary_ justice and all _genuine_ loving-kindness.… There is another proof that the moral incentive disclosed by me is the true one. I mean the fact that _animals_ also are included under its protecting ægis. In the other European systems of ethics no place is found for them, strange and inexcusable as this may appear. It is asserted that beasts have no rights; the illusion is harboured that our conduct, so far as they are concerned, has no moral significance; or, as it is put in the language of these codes, that there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals. Such a view is one of revolting coarseness--a barbarism of the West.… Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to living creatures cannot be a good man.”[6] So wrote a young German philosopher some seventy years ago; and all that has since happened in the world of thought has but served to strengthen his teaching as to our duty towards the lower animals. For since he wrote science and thought have become profoundly modified by one of those epoch-making inductions which, at very rare intervals, some great thinker is inspired to make. We have seen the establishment and the almost universal acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, involving as one of its corollaries the unity of life and the “universal kinship” of man with his humbler brethren--or cousins, if you will--of the animal world. I venture, then, to offer this teaching for my readers’ consideration. In its light I would ask them to view these questions, and if they shall think that that light is the light of reason and truth, then to follow it wheresoever it may lead. I do not think it will lead them to offer fresh hecatombs upon the blood-stained altar of Sport. FOOTNOTES: