In all this absurd woman’s statements, thus fairly epitomized, there is not one that is true—not one of which the essential falsity is not evident, obvious, conspicuous to even the most delinquent observation. Yet with the smartness and smirk of a graduating seminary girl refuting Epicurus she marshals them against the awful truth that every year in Europe and the United States alone more than one thousand human beings die of hydrophobia—a fact which her controversial conscience does not permit her to mention. The names on this needless death-roll are mostly those of small folk, the sins of whose parents in cherishing their own hereditary love of dogs is visited upon their children because these have not the intelligence and agility to get out of the way. Or perhaps they lack that tranquil courage upon which Miss Guiney relies to avert the canine tooth from her own inedible shank. Finally this amusing illogician, this type and example of the female controversialist, has the hardihood to hope that there may be fathers who can see their children die the horrible death of hydrophobia without wishing “to exile man’s best ideal of fidelity from the hearthstones of civilization.” If we must have an “ideal of fidelity” why not find it, not in the dog that kills the child, but in the father that kills the dog? The profit of maintaining a standard and pattern of the virtues (at considerable expense in the case of this insatiable canine consumer) may be great, but are we so hard pushed that we must go to the animals for it? In life and letters are there no men and women whose names kindle enthusiasm and emulation? Is fidelity, is devotion, is self-sacrifice unknown among ourselves? As a model of the higher virtues why will not one’s mother serve at a pinch? And what is the matter with Miss Guiney herself? She is faithful, at least to dogs, whatever she may be to the hundreds of American children foredoomed to a death of unthinkable agony from hydrophobia. There is perhaps a hope that when the sun’s returning flame shall gild the hither end of the thirtieth century this savage and filthy brute, the dog, will have ceased to “banquet on through a whole year” of human fat and lean; that he will have been gathered to his variously unworthy fathers to give an account of his deeds done in the body of man. In the meantime, those of us who have not the enlightened understanding to be enamored of him may endure with such fortitude as we can command his feats of tooth among the shins and throats of those who have; we ourselves are so few that there is a strong numerical presumption of personal immunity.