“You all know the immediate cause of the turning of our thoughts in this direction—­the sad case of cruelty that so unexpectedly rushed to light in Glaston.  So shocked was the man in whose house it took place that, as he drove from his door the unhappy youth who was guilty of the crime, this testimony, in the righteous indignation of his soul, believing, as you are aware, in no God and Father of all, broke from him with curses—­’There ought to be a God to punish such cruelty.’—­’Begone,’ he said.  ’Never would I commit woman or child into the hands of a willful author of suffering.’

“We are to rule over the animals; the opposite of rule is torture, the final culmination of anarchy.  We slay them, and if with reason, then with right.  Therein we do them no wrong.  Yourselves will bear me witness however and always in this place, I have protested that death is no evil, save as the element of injustice may be mingled therein.  The sting of death is sin.  Death, righteously inflicted, I repeat, is the reverse of an injury.

“What if there is too much lavishment of human affection upon objects less than human! it hurts less than if there were none.  I confess that it moves with strange discomfort one who has looked upon swarms of motherless children, to see in a childless house a ruined dog, overfed, and snarling with discomfort even on the blessed throne of childhood, the lap of a woman.  But even that is better than that the woman should love no creature at all—­infinitely better!  It may be she loves as she can.  Her heart may not yet be equal to the love of a child, may be able only to cherish a creature whose oppositions are merely amusing, and whose presence, as doubtless it seems to her, gives rise to no responsibilities.  Let her love her dog—­even although her foolish treatment of him should delay the poor animal in its slow trot towards canine perfection:  she may come to love him better; she may herself through him advance to the love and the saving of a child—­who can tell?  But do not mistake me; there are women with hearts so divinely insatiable in loving, that in the mere gaps of their untiring ministration of humanity, they will fondle any living thing capable of receiving the overflow of their affection.  Let such love as they will; they can hardly err.  It is not of such that I have spoken.

“Again, to how many a lonely woman is not life made endurable, even pleasant, by the possession and the love of a devoted dog!  The man who would focus the burning glass of science upon the animal, may well mock at such a mission, and speak words contemptuous of the yellow old maid with her yellow ribbons and her yellow dog.  Nor would it change his countenance or soften his heart to be assured that that withered husk of womanhood was lovely once, and the heart in it is loving still; that she was reduced to all but misery by the self-indulgence of a brother, to whom the desolation of a sister was but a pebble to pave