Long before Bentham, a greater mind, travelling along a nobler road of philosophy, laid down the canon which resolves the whole question. Bishop Butler affirmed that it was on the simple fact of a creature being SENTIENT--_i.e._, capable of pain and pleasure--that rests our responsibility to save it pain and give it pleasure. There is no evading this obligation, then, as regards the lower animals, by the plea that they are not moral beings. It is _our_ morality, not _theirs_, which is in question. There are special considerations which in different cases may modify our obligation, but it is on such special reasons, not on the universal non-moral nature of the brutes (as the old divines taught), that our exoneration must be founded; and the onus lies on us to show cause for each of them. The distinction between our duties to animals and our duties to our human fellow-creatures lies here. As regards them both, we are indeed forbidden to inflict avoidable pain, because both alike are sentient. But, as regards the brutes, our duties _stop_ there: whereas, as regards men, they being moral as well as sentient beings, our primary obligations toward them must concern their higher natures, and include the preservation of the lives which those higher natures invest with a sanctity exclusively their own. Thus, we reach the important conclusion that the infliction of avoidable pain is the supreme offence as regards the lower animals, but _not_ the supreme offence as regards man. Sir Henry Taylor’s noble lines go to the very root of the question:-- “Pain, terror, mortal agonies, which scare Thy heart in man, to brutes thou wilt not spare. Are theirs less sad and real? _Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes, ’tis purely piteous._” Pain is the one supreme evil of the existence of the lower animals, an evil which (so far as we can see) has no countervailing good. As to death, a painless one--so far from being the supreme evil to them--is often the truest mercy. Thus, instead of the favorite phrase of certain physiologists, that “they would put hecatombs of brutes to torture to save the smallest pain of a man,” true ethics bids us regard man’s _moral_ welfare only as of supreme importance, and anything which can injure _it_ (such, for example, as the practice, or sanction of the practice, of cruelty) as the worst of evils, even if along with it should come a mitigation of bodily pain. On this subject, the present Bishop of Winchester has put the case in a nutshell. “It is true,” he said, “that man is superior to the beast, but the part of man which we recognize as such is his moral and spiritual nature. So far as his body and its pains are concerned, there is no particular reason for considering them more than the body and bodily pains of a brute.”