Human nature being what it is, and well known to the dog to be what it is, we have a right to expect that the creature will take our weaknesses into consideration—that he will respect our addiction to reasonless panic, even as we respect his when, as we commonly do, we refrain from attaching tinware to his tail. A dog that runs himself to death to evade a kitchen utensil which could not possibly harm him, and which if he did not flee would not pursue, is the author of his own undoing in precisely the same sense as is the victim of pseudo-hydrophobia. He is slain by a theory. Yet the wicked boy that set him going is not blameless, and no one would be so zealous and strenuous in his prosecution as the cynolater, the adorer of dogs, the person who holds them guiltless of pseudo-hydrophobia. II Mr. Nicholas Smith, while United States consul at Liege, wrote, or caused to be written, an official report, wickedly, wilfully and maliciously designed to abridge the privileges, augment the ills and impair the honorable status of the domestic dog. In the very beginning of this report Mr. Smith manifests his animus by stigmatizing the domestic dog as an “hereditary loafer;” and having “hurled the allegation,” affirms “the dawn of a (Belgian) new era” wherein the pampered menial will loaf no more. There is to be no more sun-soaking on door mats having a southern exposure, no more usurpation of the warmest segment of the family semicircle, no more personal solicitation of cheer at the domestic board. The dog’s place in the social scale is no longer to be determined by considerations of sentiment, but will be the result of cold commercial calculation, and so fixed as best to serve the ends of industrial expediency. All this in Belgium, where the dog is already in active service as a beast of burden and draught; doubtless the transition to that humble condition from his present and immemorial social elevation in less advanced countries will be slow and characterized by bitter factional strife. America, especially, although ever accessible to the infection of new and profitable ideas, will be slow to accept so radical a subversion of a social superstructure that almost may be said to rest upon the domestic dog as a basic verity. The dogs are our only true “leisure class” (even our tramps are sometimes compelled to engage in such simple industries as are possible in the county jail) and we are justly proud of them. Dogs toil not, neither spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not a dog. Instead of making them hewers of wood and drawers of water, it would be more consonant with the Anglomaniacal and general Old World spirit, now so dominant in the councils of the nation, to make them “hereditary legislators.” And Mr. Smith must permit me to add, with a special significance, that history records an instance of even a horse making a fairly good consul.