In the first place, it seems to me that a sense of serious responsibility toward the brutes ought to replace our “lady-and-the-nosegay” condition of _insouciance_. The “ages before morality” are at an end at last, even in this remote province of human freedom. Of all the grotesque ideas which have imposed on us in the solemn phraseology of divines and moralists, none is more absurd than the doctrine that our moral obligations stop short where the object of them does not happen to know them, and assures us that, because the brutes cannot call us to account for our transgressions, nothing that we can do will constitute a transgression. To absolve us from paying for a pair of boots because our bootmaker’s ledger had unluckily been burned would be altogether a parallel lesson in morality. It is plain enough, indeed, that the creature who is (as we assume) without a conscience or moral arbitrament must always be exonerated from guilt, no matter what it may do of hurt or evil; and the judicial proceedings against, and executions of, oxen and pigs in the Middle Ages for manslaughter were unspeakably absurd. But not less absurd, on the other side, is it to exonerate men, who _have_ consciences and free will, when they are guilty of cruelty to brutes, on the plea not that _they_, but the brutes are immoral and irresponsible.[23] A moral being is not moral on one side of him only, but moral _all round_, and toward all who are above, beside, and beneath him: just as a gentleman is a gentleman not only to the king, but to the peasant; and as a truthful man speaks truth to friend and stranger. Just in the same way, the “merciful man is merciful to his beast,” as he is merciful to the beggar at his gate. I may add that every noble quality is specially tested by its exhibition in those humbler directions wherein there is nothing to be gained by showing it and nothing to be lost by contrary behavior. There is a passage from Jeremy Bentham, quoted in Mrs. Jamieson’s _Commonplace Book_ and elsewhere, which will recur to many readers at this point: “The day may come,” he says, “when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. It may come one day to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the _os sacrum_, are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor.... The question is not, Can they reason? or Can they speak? but, Can they suffer?”