BULL-FIGHTING
The Spanish Bull-Fight. By J. Morewood Dowsett. (John Bale. Sons and Danielsson. 3d. net.) '
OUR congratulations and thanks are due to Mr. Dowsett for the detached and accurate account he has given us in this little pamphlet of what the Spanish bull-fight actually is. Instead of description we have a brief, bare indication of facts which tell their tale better than impassioned rhetoric could do. The longer part of a bull-fight consists in wearing out the strength of the bull by pitting it against a succession of horses; which it disentrails, until at last it is possible for the bull-fighter to give it the death-stroke. If, as not infrequently happens, the bull does not " show fight," it is maddened into doing so by fire-darts which explode gunpowder in its -flesh It may be said that the bull, being a fighting animal, does not suffer more than animals of the jungle in combat, or fighting cocks, or—to take quite a different case—as much as a hunted fox or a coursed rabbit. But that, does not dispose of the slow torture of the horseS which are put up to be gored with no chance of escape. It is perhaps a natural first impulse to regard the passion as due simply to delight in cruelty. Yet the truth seems to be that bull-fighting-continues because the spectators find so great a delight in the excitement and danger that all sense is lost of the cruelty involved and of the human degradation which must inevitably accompany it. The familiar plea that animals, being inferior to man, are properly sacrificed for his benefit conceals the fact that being higher than the animals man is capable of falling lower than they.
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