To prevent death is, undoubtedly, impossible; but we may _prolong_ life. We may eventually render pain rarer, less cruel, and _almost suppress_ it. That the hardened old world laughs at our expression is so much the better. We saw quite such a spectacle in the days when our Europe, barbarised by war, centered all medical art in surgery, and made the knife its only means of cure, while young America discovered the miracle of that profound dream in which all pain is annihilated. He upbraids the sportsman no less than he does the scientist, and finds sufficient cause for the too general sterility of the intellect in the habituation to slaughter, and in disregard for the subject species:-- “Woe to the ungrateful! By this phrase I mean the sporting crowd, who, unmindful of the numerous benefits we owe to other animals, exterminate innocent life. A terrible sentence weighs upon the tribes of ‘sportsmen’--_they can create nothing_. They originate no art, no industry. They have added nothing to the hereditary patrimony of the human species.... “Do not believe the axiom, that huntsmen gradually develope into agriculturalists. It is not so--they kill or die. Such is their whole destiny. We see it clearly through experience. He who has killed will kill--he who has created will create. “In the want of emotion, which every man suffers from his birth, the child who satisfies it habitually by murder, by a miniature ferocious drama of surprise and treason, of the torture of the weak, will find no great enjoyment in the gentle and tranquil emotions arising from the progressive success of toil and study, from the limited industry which does everything itself. To create, to destroy--these are the two raptures of infancy. To create is a long, slow process; to destroy is quick and easy. “It is a shocking and hideous thing to see a child partial to ‘sport;’ to see woman enjoying and admiring murder, and encouraging her child. That delicate and ‘sensitive’ woman would not give him a knife, but she gives him a gun. Kill at a distance if it pleases you, for we do not see the suffering. And this Mother will think it admirable that her son, kept confined to his room, will drive off _ennui_ by plucking the wings from flies, by torturing a bird or a little dog. “Far-seeing mother! She will know, when too late, the evil of having formed a bad heart. Aged and weak, rejected of the world, she will experience, in her turn, her son’s brutality. “Among too many children we are saddened by their almost incredible sterility. A few recover from it in the long circle of life, when they have become experienced and enlightened men. But the first freshness of the heart? It shall return no more.”[259]