Chapter 10

Yet this addiction to sensuality, beyond all competition of worthier modes and means of interest, does not altogether refuse to admit of some division and diversion of the vulgar feelings, in favor of some things of a more mental character, provided they be vicious. A man so neglected in his youth that he cannot spell the names of Alexander, Cæsar, or Napoleon, or read them if he see them spelt, may feel the strong incitement of ambition. This, instead of raising him, may only propel him forward on the level of his debased condition and society; and it is a favorable supposition that makes him "the best wrestler on the green," or a manful pugilist; for it is probable his grand delight may be, to indulge himself in an oppressive, insolent arrogance toward such as are unable to maintain a strife with him on terms of fair rivalry, making his will the law to all whom he can force or frighten into submission.

Coarse sensuality admits, again, an occasional competition of the gratifications of cruelty; a flagrant characteristic, generally, of uncultivated degraded human creatures, both where the whole community consists of such, as in barbarian and savage tribes, and where they form a large portion of it, as in this country.--It is hardly worth while to put in words the acknowledgment of the obvious and odious fact, that a considerable share of mental attainment is sometimes inefficient to extinguish, or even repress, this infernal principle of human nature, by which it is gratifying to witness and inflict suffering, even separately from any prompting of revenge. But why do we regard such examples as peculiarly hateful, and brand them with the most intense reprobation, but _because_ it is judged the fair and natural tendency of mental cultivation to repress that principle, insomuch that its failure to do so is considered as evincing a surpassing virulence of depravity? Every one is ready with the saying of the ancient poet, that liberal acquirements suppress ferocious propensities. But if the whole virtue of such discipline may prove insufficient, think what must be the consequence of its being almost wholly withheld, so that the execrable propensity may go into action with its malignity unmitigated, unchecked, by any remonstrance of feeling or taste, or reason or conscience.

And such a consequence is manifest in the lower ranks of our self-extolled community; notwithstanding a diminution, which the progress of education and religion has slowly effected, in certain of the once most favorite and customary practices of cruelty; what we might denominate the classic games of the rude populace. These very practices, nevertheless, still keep their ground in some of the more heathenish parts of the country; and if it were possible, that the more improved notions and taste of the more respectable classes could admit of any countenance being given to their revival in the more civilized parts, it would be found that, even there, a large portion of the people is to this hour left in a disposition which would welcome the return of savage exhibitions. It may be, that some of the most atrocious forms and degrees of cruelty would not please the greater number of them; there have been instances in which an English populace has shown indignation at extreme and _unaccustomed_ perpetrations, sometimes to the extent of cruelly revenging them; very rarely, however, when only brute creatures have been the sufferers. Not many would be delighted with such scenes as those which, in the _Place de Grève_, used to be a gratification to a multitude of all ranks of the Parisians. But how many odious facts, characteristic of our people, have come under every one's observation.

Who has not seen numerous instances of the delight with which advantage is taken of weakness or simplicity, to practise upon them some sly mischief, or inflict some open mortification; and of the unrepressed glee with which the rude spectators can witness or abet the malice? And if, in such a case, an indignant observer has hazarded a remark or expostulation, the full stare, and the quickly succeeding laugh and retort of brutal scorn, have thrown open to his revolting sight the state of the recess within, where the moral sentiments are; and shown how much the perceptions and notions had been indebted to the cares of the instructor. Could he help thinking what was deserved somewhere, by individuals or by the local community collectively, for suffering a being to grow up to quite or nearly the complete dimensions and features of manhood, with so vile a thing within it in substitution for what a soul should be? We need not remark, what every one has noticed, how much the vulgar are amused by seeing vexatious or injurious incidents, (if only not quite disastrous or tragical,) befalling persons against whom they can have no resentment; how ferocious often their temper and means of revenge when they _have_ causes of resentment; or how intensely delighted, (in company, it is true, with many that are called their betters,) in beholding several of their fellow-mortals, whether in anger or athletic competition, covering each other with bruises, deformity, and blood.

Our institutions, however, protect, in some considerable degree, man against man, as being framed in a knowledge of what would else become of the community. But observe a moment what are the dispositions of the vulgar as indulged, and with no preventive interference of those institutions, on the inferior animals. To a large proportion of this class it is, in their youth, one of the most vivid exhilarations to witness the terrors and anguish of living beings. In many parts of the country it would be no improbable conjecture in explanation of a savage yell heard at a distance, that a company of rationals may be witnessing the writhings, agonies, and cries, of some animal struggling for escape or for life, while it is suffering the infliction, perhaps, of stones, and kicks, or wounds by more directly fatal means of violence. If you hear in the clamor a sudden burst of fiercer exultation, you may surmise that just then a deadly blow has been given. There is hardly an animal on the whole face of the country, of size enough, and enough within reach to be a marked object of attention, that would not be persecuted to death if no consideration of ownership interposed. The children of the uncultivated families are allowed, without a check, to exercise and improve the hateful disposition, on flies, young birds, and other feeble and harmless creatures; and they are actually encouraged to do it on what, under the denomination of vermin, are represented in the formal character of enemies, almost in such a sense as if a moral responsibility belonged to them, and they were therefore not only to be destroyed as a nuisance, but deserving to be punished as offenders.

The hardening against sympathy, with the consequent carelessness of inflicting pain, combined as this will probably be, with the _love_ of inflicting it, must be confirmed by the horrid spectacle of slaughter; a spectacle sought for gratification by the children and youth of the lower order; and in many places so publicly exhibited that they cannot well avoid seeing it, and its often savage preliminary circumstances, sometimes directly wanton aggravations; perhaps in revenge of a struggle to resist or escape, perhaps in a rage at the awkward manner in which the victim adjusts itself to a convenient position for suffering. Horrid, we call the prevailing practice, because it is the infliction, on millions of sentient and innocent creatures every year, in what calls itself a humane and Christian nation, of anguish unnecessary to the purpose. Unnecessary--what proof is there to the contrary?--To _what_ is the present practice necessary?--Some readers will remember the benevolent (we were going to say _humane_, but that is an equivocal epithet,) attempt made a number of years since by Lord Somerville to introduce, but he failed, a mode of slaughter, without suffering; a mode in use in a foreign nation with which we should deem it very far from a compliment to be placed on a level in point of civilization. And it is a flagrant dishonor to such a country, and to the class that virtually, by rank, and formally, by official station, have presided over its economy, one generation after another, that so hideous a fact should never, as far as we know, have been deemed by the highest state authorities worth even a question whether a mitigation might not be practicable. An inconceivable daily amount of suffering, inflicted on unknown thousands of creatures, dying in slow anguish, when their death might be without pain as being instantaneous, is accounted no deformity in the social system, no incongruity with the national profession of religion of which the essence is charity and mercy, nothing to sully the polish, or offend the refinement, of what demands to be accounted, in its higher portions, a pre-eminently civilized and humanized community. Precious and well protected polish and refinement, and humanity, and Christian civilization! to which it is a matter of easy indifference to know that, in the neighborhood of their abode, those tortures of butchery are unnecessarily inflicted, which could not be actually witnessed by persons in whom the pretension to these fine qualities is anything better than affectation, without sensations of horror; which it would ruin the character of a fine gentleman or lady to have voluntarily witnessed in a single instance.

They are known to be inflicted, and yet this is a trifle not worth an effort toward innovation on inveterate custom, on the part of the influential classes; who may be far more worthily intent on a change in the fashion of a dress, or possibly some new refinement in the cookery of the dead bodies of the victims. Or the _living_ bodies; as we are told that the most delicious preparation of an eel for exquisite palates is to thrust the fish alive into the fire: while lobsters are put into water _gradually_ heated to boiling. The latter, indeed, is an old practice, like that of _crimping_ another fish. Such things are allowed or required to be done by persons pretending to the highest refinement. It is a matter far below legislative attention; while the powers of definition are exhausted under the stupendous accumulation of regulations and interdictions for the good order of society. So hardened may the moral sense of a community be by universal and continual custom, that we are perfectly aware these very remarks will provoke the ridicule of many persons, including, it is possible enough, some who may think it quite consistent to be ostentatiously talking at the very same time of Christian charity and benevolent zeal. [Footnote: This was actually done in a religious periodical publication.] Nor will that ridicule be repressed by the notoriety of the fact, that the manner of the practice referred to steels and depraves, to a dreadful degree, a vast number of human beings immediately employed about it; and, as a spectacle, powerfully contributes to confirm, in a greater number, exactly that which it is, by eminence, the object of moral tuition to counteract--men's disposition to make-light of all suffering but their own. This one thing, this not caring for what may be endured by other beings made liable to suffering, is the very essence of the depravity which is so fatal to our race in their social constitution. This selfish hardness is moral plague enough even in an inactive state, as a mere carelessness what other beings may suffer; but there lurks in it a malignity which is easily stimulated to delight in seeing or causing their suffering. And yet, we repeat it, a civilized and Christian nation feels not the slightest self-displacency for its allowing a certain unhappy but necessary part in the economy of the world to be executed, (by preference to a harmless method,) in a manner which probably does as much to corroborate in the vulgar class this essential principle of depravity, as all the expedients of melioration yet applied are doing to expel it.

Were it not vain and absurd to muse on supposable new principles in the constitution of the moral system, there is one that we might have been tempted to wish for, namely, that, of all suffering _unnecessarily_ and wilfully inflicted by man on any class of sentient existence, a bitter intimation and participation might be conveyed to him through a mysterious law of nature, enforcing an avenging sympathy in severe proportion to that suffering, on all the men who are really accountable for its being inflicted.

After children and youth are trained to behold with something worse than hardened indifference, with a gratifying excitement, the sufferings of creatures dying for the service of man, it is no wonder if they are barbarous in their treatment of those that serve him by their life. And in fact nothing is more obvious as a prevailing disgrace to our nation, than the cruel habits of the lower class toward the laboring animals committed to their power. These animals have no security in their best condition and most efficient services; but generally the hateful disposition is the most fully exercised on those that have been already the greatest sufferers. Meeting, wherever we go, with some of these starved, abused, exhausted figures, we shall not unfrequently meet with also another figure accompanying them--that of a ruffian, young or old, who with a visage of rage, and accents of hell, is wreaking his utmost malevolence on a wretched victim for being slow in performing, or quite failing to perform, what the excess of loading, and perhaps the feebleness of old age, have rendered difficult or absolutely impracticable; or for shrinking from an effort to be made by a pressure on bleeding sores, or for losing the right direction through blindness, and that itself perhaps occasioned by hardship or savage violence. Many of the exacters of animal labor really seem to resent it as a kind of presumption and insult in the slave, that it would be anything else than a machine, that the living being should betray under its toils that it suffers, that it is pained, weary, or reluctant. And if, by outrageous abuse, it should be excited to some manifestation of resentment, that is a crime for which the sufferer would be likely to incur such a fury and repetition of blows and lacerations as to die on the spot, but for an interfering admonition of interest against destroying such a piece of property, and losing so much service. When that service has utterly exhausted, often before the term of old age, the strength of those wretched animals, there awaits many of them a last short stage of still more remorseless cruelty; that in which it is become a doubtful thing whether the utmost efforts to which the emaciated, diseased, sinking frame can be forced by violence, be worth the trouble of that violence, the delays and accidents, and the expense of the scanty supply of subsistence. As they must at all events very soon perish, it has ceased to be of any material consequence, on the score of interest, how grossly they may be abused; and their tormentors seem delighted with this release from all restraint on their dispositions. Those dispositions, as indulged in some instances, when the miserable creatures are formally consigned to be destroyed, cannot be much exceeded by anything we can attribute to fiends. Some horrid exemplifications were adduced, not as single casual circumstances, but as usual practices, by a patriotic senator some years since, in endeavoring to obtain a legislative enactment in mitigation of the sufferings of the brute tribes. The design vanished to nothing in the House of Commons, under the effect of argument and ridicule from a person distinguished for intellectual cultivation; whose resistance was not only against that specific measure, but avowedly against the principle itself on which _any_ measure of the same tendency could ever be founded. [Footnote: Lord Erskine's memorable Bill, triumphantly scouted by the late Mr. Windham.--Undoubtedly there are considerable difficulties in the way of legislation on the subject; but an equal share of difficulty attending some other subjects--an affair of revenue, for instance, or a measure for the suppression (at that time) of political opinion--would soon have been overcome.] Nor could any victory have pleased him better, probably, than one which contributed to prolong the barbarism of the people, as the best security, he deemed, for their continuing fit to labor at home and fight abroad. It might have added to this gratification to hear (as was the fact) his name pronounced with delight by ruffians of all classes, who regarded him as their patron saint.

If any one should be inclined to interpose here with a remark, that after _such_ a reference, we have little right to ascribe to those classes, as if it were peculiarly one of their characteristics, the insensibility to the sufferings of the brute creation, and to number it formally among the results of the "lack of knowledge," we can only reply, that however those of higher order may explode any attempt to make the most efficient authority of the nation bear repressively upon the evil, and however it may in other ways be abetted by them, it is, at any rate, in those inferior classes chiefly that the actual perpetrators of it are found. It is something to say in favor of cultivation, that it does, generally speaking, render those who have the benefit of it incapable of practising, _themselves_, the most palpably flagrant of these cruelties which they may be virtually countenancing, by some things which they do, and some things which they omit or refuse to do. Mr. Windham would not himself have practised a wanton barbarity on a poor horse or ass, though he scouted any legislative attempt to prevent it among his inferiors.

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The proper place would perhaps have been nearer the beginning of this description of the characteristics of our uneducated people, for one so notorious, and one entering so much into the essence of the evils already named, as that we mention next; _a rude, contracted, unsteady, and often perverted sense of right and wrong in general_.

It is curious to look into a large volume of religious casuistry, the work of some divine of a former age, (for instance Bishop Taylor's _Ductor Dubitantium,_) with the reflection what a conscience disciplined in the highest degree might be; and then to observe what this regulator of the soul actually is where there has been no sound discipline of the reason, and where there is no deep religious sentiment to rectify the perceptions in the absence of an accurate intellectual discrimination of things. This sentiment being wanting, dispositions and conduct cannot be taken account of according to the distinction between holiness and sin; and in the absence of a cultivated understanding, they cannot be brought to the test of the distinguishing law between propriety and turpitude; nor estimated upon any comprehensive notion of utility. The evidence of all this is thick and close around us; so that every serious observer has been struck and almost shocked to observe, in what a very small degree conscience is a _necessary_ attribute of the human creature; and how nearly a nonentity the whole system of moral principles may be, as to any recognition of it by an unadapted spirit. While that system is of a substance veritable and eternal, and stands forth in its exceeding breadth, marked with the strongest characters and prominences, it has to these persons hardly the reality or definiteness of a shadow, except in a few matters, if we may so express it, of the grossest bulk. There must be glaring evidence of something bad in what is done, or questioned whether to be done, before conscience will come to its duty, or give proof of its existence. There must be a violent alarm of mischief or danger before this drowsy and ignorant magistrate will interfere. And since occasions thus involving flagrant evil cannot be of very frequent occurrence in the life of the generality of the people, it is probable that many of them have considerably protracted exemptions from any interference of conscience at all; it is certain that they experience no such pertinacious attendance of it, as to feel habitually a monitory intimation, that without great thought and care they will inevitably do something wrong. But what may we judge and presage of the moral fortunes of a sojourner, of naturally corrupt propensity, in this bad world, who is not haunted, sometimes to a degree of alarm, by this monitory sense, through the whole course of his life? What is likely to become of him, if he shall go hither and thither on the scene exempt from all sensible obstruction of the many interdictions, of a nature too refined for any sense but the vital tenderness of conscience to perceive?

Obstructions of a more gross and tangible nature he is continually meeting. A large portion of what he is accustomed to see presents itself to him in the character of boundary and prohibition; on every hand there is something to warn him what he must not do. There are high walls, and gates, and fences, and brinks of torrents and precipices; in short, an order of things on all sides signifying to him, with more or less of menace,--Thus far and no further. And he is in a general way obsequious to this arrangement. We do not ordinarily expect to see him carelessly transgressing the most decided of the artificial boundaries, or daring across those dreadful ones of nature. But, nearly destitute of the faculty to perceive, (as in coming in contact with something charged with the element of lightning,) the awful interceptive lines of that other arrangement which he is in the midst of as a subject of the laws of God, we see with what insensibility he can pass through those prohibitory significations of the Almighty will, which are to devout men as lines streaming with an infinitely more formidable than material fire. And if we look on to his future course, proceeding under so fatal a deficiency, the consequence foreseen is, that those lines of divine interdiction which he has not conscience to perceive as meant to deter him, he will seem as if he had acquired, through a perverted will, a recognition of in another quality--as temptations to attract him.

But to leave these terms of generality and advert to a few particulars of illustration:--Recollect how commonly persons of the class described are found utterly violating truth, not in hard emergencies only, but as an habitual practice, and apparently without the slightest reluctance or compunction, their moral sense quite at rest under the accumulation of a thousand deliberate falsehoods. It is seen that by far the greater number of them think it no harm to take little unjust advantages in their dealings, by deceptive management; and very many would take the greatest but for fear of temporal consequences; would do it, that is to say, without inquietude of conscience, in the proper sense. It is the testimony of experience from persons who have had the most to transact with them, that the indispensable rule of proceeding is to assume generally their want of principle, and leave it to time and prolonged trial to establish, rather slowly, the individual exceptions. Those unknowing admirers of human nature, or of English character, who are disposed to exclaim against this as an illiberal rule, may be recommended to act on what they will therefore deem a liberal one--at their cost.