progress

The short cut is not always the right path; and to perpetrate a cruel injustice on the lower animals, and then attempt to excuse it on the ground that it will benefit posterity, is an argument which is as irrelevant as it is immoral. For the present, however, we may group the domestic animals of this country in three main divisions, i horses, asses, and mules ; 2 oxen, sheep, goats, and pigs ; 3 dogs and cats. The root of the evil lies, as I have throughout asserted, in that detestable assumption detestable equally whether it be based on pseudo-religious or pseudo-scientific grounds that there is a gulf, an impassable barrier, between man and the animals, and that the moral instincts of compassion, justice, and love, are to be as sedulously repressed and thwarted in the one direction as they are to be fostered and extended in the other. For example, it has been said by a well-known writer on the subject of humanity to animals [6] that '' the life of a brute, having no moral purpose, can best be understood ethically as representing the sum of its pleasures ; and the obligation, therefore, of producing the pleasures of sentient creatures must be reduced, in their case, to the abstinence from unnecessary destruction of life. Just this; that every great liberating movement has proceeded exactly on these lines.

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