Nor are these things perhaps so strange as they might at first appear, for, in spite of their boasted progress in sciences and arts, my countrymen are still practically ignorant of the real kinship which exists between mankind and the other races, and of the duties which this kinship implies. They are still the victims of that old anthropocentric superstition which pictures Man as the centre of the universe, and separated from the inferior animals--mere playthings made for his august pleasure and amusement--by a deep intervening gulf; and it is probable enough that if any one of these unthinking savages who “break up” a hare, or baptize their children in the blood of a butchered fox, were reminded that he himself is in very truth an “animal,” he would resent such statement of an established fact as a slight on his religious convictions and on his personal self-respect. For, as the author of _Hudibras_ discovered: There’s nothing so absurd, or vain, Or barbarous, or inhumane, But if it lay the least pretence To piety and godliness, And zeal for gospel truths profess, Does sacred instantly commence. The very scientists themselves, who have in theory renounced the old-fashioned idea of a universe created for mankind, are inclined in practice to belie their own biological faith, for they claim the moral right to devote large numbers of the lower animals, without scruple or remorse, to the tortures of “research,” just as if the fact of a close kinship between the vivisector who wields the scalpel and the dog who lies in the trough were a notion of which Science is unaware! Is it surprising that, to those of us who have gradually realized that we are dwelling in a wild land among savages such as these, the consciousness of the discovery should at times bring with it a sense of unutterable loneliness and desolation--that we should feel cut off, as it were, by interminable leagues of misunderstanding from all human intercourse, and from all possibility of expressing ourselves? What appeal _can_ be made to people whose first instinct, on seeing a beautiful animal, full of joyousness and vitality, is to hunt or eat it? One can only marvel how such sheer, untempered barbarism has come down to us from the past.