We are often told that there is no other western country where tame animals are so well treated as in England, and it is only necessary to read the records of a century back to see that the inhumanities of the past were far more atrocious than any that are still practised in the present. Let us be thankful for these facts, as showing that the current of English opinion is at least moving in the right direction. But it must yet be said that the sights that everywhere meet the eye of a humane and thoughtful observer, whether in town or country, are a disgrace to our vaunted “civilization.” Watch the cab traffic in one of the crowded thoroughfares of our great cities--always the same lugubrious patient procession of underfed overloaded animals, the same brutal insolence of the drivers, the same accursed sound of the whip. And remembering that these horses are gifted with a large degree of sensibility and intelligence, must one not feel that the fate to which they are thus mercilessly subjected is a shameful violation of the principle which moralists have laid down?
Yet it is to this fate that even the well-kept horses of the rich must in time descend, so to pass the declining years of a life devoted to man’s service! “A good man,” said Plutarch, “will take care of his horses and dogs, not only while they are young, but when old and past service. We ought certainly not to treat living beings like shoes and household goods, which, when worn out with use, we throw away.” Such was the feeling of the old pagan writer, and our good Christians of the present age scarcely seem to have improved on it. True, they do not “throw away” their superannuated carriage-horses--it is so much more lucrative to _sell_ them to the shopman or cab-proprietor, who will in due course pass them on to the knacker and cat’s-meat man.
The use of machinery is often condemned, on æsthetic grounds, because of the ugliness it has introduced into so many features of modern life. On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that it has immensely relieved the huge mass of animal labour, and that when such forces are generally used for purposes of traction, one of the foulest blots on our social humanity is likely to disappear. Scientific and mechanical invention, so far from being necessarily antagonistic to a true beauty of life, may be found to be of the utmost service to it, when they are employed for humane and not merely commercial, purposes.[21] Herein Thoreau is a wiser teacher than Ruskin. “If all were as it seems,” he says, “and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer’s fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort.”