There is nothing more frightful to the philosopher than the unconscious tragedies of human reason. Men are somnambulists. Stupefied by the long night of instinct out of which it arose, the human mind is only half awake to the world of reality and duty. George Washington was the father of his country, and a great and good man, but he held human beings as slaves, and paid his hired help in Virginia whisky. It took Americans one hundred years to find out that “all men” includes Ethiopians; yet men who risked their lives in order to achieve personal and political liberty for black men, deliberately doom white women to a similar servitude. A rich man will give millions of dollars to a museum or a university, when he would know, if he had the talent to stop and think, that the thousands who make his wealth work like slaves from morning till night, and feed on garbage and suffocate in garrets, in order that he may be munificent.
But without doubt the most frightful inconsistency of civilized minds to-day is seen in the treatment accorded by human beings to their sub-human associates. Human nature is nowhere so hideous and the human conscience is nowhere so profoundly asleep as in their ruthless disregard for the life and happiness of the non-human animal world. It is enough almost to make villains weep — the cold-blooded manner in which we cut their throats, dash out their brains, and discuss their flavor at our cannibalistic feasts. As Plutarch says, “Lions, tigers, and serpents we call savage and ferocious, yet we ourselves come behind them in no species of barbarity.” From our cradles up we have been taught that mercy to the lamb and the heifer is a disease, and we have become so accustomed to deeds of violence and assassination that we perpetrate them and see them perpetrated without the semblance of a shudder.
See that dainty lady going down the aisles of the cathedral! She looks in her silks and loveliness the very picture of purity and innocence. But look closer, and you will discern in her faultless art the disfigurements of crime. See those furs! They did not fall like snowflakes from the bounteous lap of heaven. They were stripped from the quivering form of some outraged Northern creature to whom life and happiness were as dear as to her. Look at her head-dress! Those fluttering wings are the remains of song-birds whose beauty and joy once filled the woods and fields. But their throats were silenced, and their beautiful and happy lives ended forever to amuse the vanity of this spiced and be-ribboned worshiper. She ate breakfast this morning, and she ate that which compelled the darkest crime on the calendar — murder! Her innocence, therefore, is in the eyes of those who behold her, and her conscience is spotless only because it is asleep.
And so with us all; we are criminals — criminals of the most shocking hue. And if we were only able to shake off this somnambulism and see ourselves as we are, and as the future will certainly see us, we should be terrified by the crimes we are committing. Take the delicate organism of the heifer,— an organism more beautiful and in some respects more tender and wonderful than that of human beings, — yet we take that sensitive organism, all palpitating with life and full of nerves, and torture it and mutilate it and chop it into twitching fragments with a composure and nonchalance that would do honor to the managers of an inferno. We call ourselves the paragons of the universe, yet we are so hideous and inhuman that all other beings flee from our approach as from a pestilence. We preach the Golden Rule with an enthusiasm that is well-nigh vehement, and then freckle the globe with huge murder-houses for the expeditious destruction of those who have as good a right to live as we have. Every holiday is an occasion for special massacre and brutality. Thanksgiving, the day above all others when it seems men’s minds would be bent on compassion, is a furious farce. Instead of being a day of grace, mercy, and peace, it is a day of gluttony and ferocity. Killing tournaments by “crack shots” are the order of the day. Imprisoned pigeons, suddenly freed, are shot down without mercy by unfailing marksmen. In many places rival squads of armed men scour forest and prairie, indiscriminately massacring every living creature that is not able to escape them, and for no higher or humaner purpose than just to see which side can kill the most! This is a crime unparalleled on the face of the earth. No species of animal, except man, plunges to such depths of atrocity. It is bad enough in all conscience for one being to send a bullet through the brain of another in order to tear it to pieces and swallow it, but when such outrages are perpetrated by organized packs just for pastime, it becomes an enormity beyond characterization!
Look at the scenes to be met with in all our great cities! They are enough to horrify a heart of flint! An army of butchers standing in blood ankle deep, and working themselves to exhaustion cutting the throats of their helpless fellows,— unsuspecting oxen with limpid eyes looking up at the deadly poleax and a moment later lying a-quiver under its relentless thud; struggling swine swinging by their hinders with their life leaping from their gashed jugulars; an atmosphere in perpetual churn with the groans and yells of the massacred; streets thronged with unprocessioned funerals; everywhere corpses dangling from sale- hooks or sprawling on chopping-blocks; men and women kneeling nightly by their bedsides and congratulating themselves on their whiteness and rising each morning and leaping on the bloody remains of some slaughtered creature,— such are the spectacles in all our streets and stock-yards, and such are the enormities perpetrated day after day by Christian cannibals on the defenseless dumb animals of this world!
It is simply monstrous, this horrible savagery and somnambulism in which we grope. It is the climax of mundane infamy — the “paragon of the universe”(?) dozing on the pedestal of his imagination and contemplating himself as an interstellar pet and all other beings as commodities. Let us startle ourselves, those of us who can, to a realization of the holocaust we are perpetrating on our feathered and fur-covered friends. For remember the same sentiment of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man’s manacles and is to-day melting the white woman’s chains will to-morrow emancipate the sorrel horse and the heifer; and as the ages bloom and the great wheels of the centuries grind on, all the races of the earth shall become kind, and this age of ours, so bigoted and raw, shall be remembered in history as an age of insanity, somnambulism, and blood.