The annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals took place on Tuesday, and was signalised by a very eloquent speech from Mr. John Morley, who dilated on the services rendered by the lower animals to man, without whose help lie could never have fulfilled his task of subduing the earth, and on the debt of kindness and gratitude which man owes them in return. The speaker was especially severe on the negligences and cruelties of the aristocratic classes in pigeon-slaughtering, polo, &c., cruelties which he considered much more really culpable than outbreaks of savagery in the famished and ill-taught coster- mongers of the East End, and for a time it seemed doubtful whether the sympathy of the audience went with him ; but his honesty and eloquence carried the day, and be sat down amidst a burst of cheering, with the remark,—" How red would be the record of dumb animals, if they could tell the tale of our treatment to them! The poor have no monopoly in their wicked- ness,—Belgravia is as guilty as Whitechapel." Yet we could wish that Mr. Morley, whose opinion would have had some weight with the scientific men, had thrown his influence into the scale against the practice of vivisection, on which apparently he did not touch. The Report of the Royal Society itself was somewhat emphatically silent on the same subject.
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