We have discussed elsewhere some of the very flimsy and
ill- informed answers made to the prayer of the memorial, and re- ferred to the high sanction which the movement has gained from an authority no less deeply interested in the investigations of medical science than the Lancet itself. We may, however, here just notice the extraordinary line taken by the Pall Mall of Thursday. It holds that the proper justification of a law punish- ing cruelty to animals is solely that the " wanton " ill-treatment of animals,—(the word "wanton," by the way, was advisedly struck out of the old Act on this subject, as if to imply that there may be cruelty without wantonness),—brutalises men, and renders them at least likely to be guilty of crimes of violence against their own kind ; whereas the objects of the Vivisec- tionists, and the beneficial results of their investigations, ought to protect them against all this kind of danger. But if it be true that there is no intrinsic good at all in tenderness and consideration for the lower animals themselves,—which is what the whole article implies,—but only a disadvantage in cultivating a mood of mind which may not improbably infect our temper towards our own kind,—if it is not for the sake of the lower creatures, but for man's sake only, that we should shrink from the Voluntary infliction of pain, then the torture of an animal directly for the pleasure of man,—say, of the goose for the preparation of the piite de foie gras,—should be quite as justifiable as tor- ture for the relief of human pain. If sympathy with the lower creatures has no claim on us for its own sake, the infliction of pain on them for the purpose of extracting a human pleasure, must be quite as justifiable, and as free from all brutalising effect, as the infliction of pain on them for the sake of mitigating a human pain. The position will not hold. water for a moment. The object of punishing cruelty to animals is to inspire sympathy with all sensitive creatures, for their own sakes, and this object is as much imperilled by the habit of deliberately inflicting on them torture in the ultimate hope of diminishing human suffer- ing, as by the same habit indulged in the 'ultimate hope of promoting human enjoyments.
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