From “Critical Studies.”

THE DESIRE for excitement is the most conspicuous feature, and the most dangerous disease of the age; anything which provides it is welcome; people are bored despite their incessant search of distraction, and anything which will exorcise the spectre of boredom is eagerly received; and, after all, it would be absurd if persons who go to see steeple chases pretended to be too squeamish to cry the “Habet”! Let the managers of Olympia obtain permission for gladiatorial games (death being guaranteed), and I will promise them that “all London” in the most fashionable sense of those words will crowd from April to August to see the sport.

  If the ladies could be allowed to descend into the arena, to touch the dying bodies, as Nero used to like to do, to see the faint life still lingering shrink and writhe, this success would be still greater; and Nero was but a primitive creature, he had but a heated iron wand, whereas my ladies could be provided by their favorite scientist with the much more excruciating torment of electricity. Imagine what exquisite little jeweled instruments of torture, made to fasten on to a bracelet, or hide within a ring, would fill the shops in Bond Street and Piccadilly. “We are going electrolyzing!” would be heard from all the pretty lips of the leaders of society; and they would cease to care for their bicycles, and autocars, and even for the discussion of actresses’ new gowns. “How many dead ’uns did you knock off last night?” their most intimate friend would ask, as he would lean over the rails in Rotten Row, sucking the crook of his cane.

  Does this appear exaggerated and libelous? Well, let us look at the example given by a London leader of fashion and politics as she goes down at election time to shed sweetness and light around her in Poplar or Shoreditch.

  In her bonnet is, of course, an osprey aigret; she knows it was torn from a living creature, but then that was done far away in some Asiatic or American creek or forest, and so really does not matter. Her suede gloves fit like her skin; they were the skin of a kid, and were probably stripped from its living body, as this lends suppleness to the skin. The jacket she carries on her arm is lined with Astrakhan fur, which was taken from an unborn lamb to give to the fur that curl and kink which pleases her; it has been cut from its mother’s ripped-up womb. Her horses, as they wait for her at the corner of the street, have their heads fixed in air, and the muscles of their necks cramped by immovable bearing reins. Her Japanese pug runs after her, shaking his muzzle-tortured nose. She has a telegram in her pocket which has momentarily vexed her. She sent her sable collie to the dog exhibition at Brussels, and the excitement, or the crush, or the want of water, or something, has brought on heat apoplexy, and they wire that he is dead,—poor old nervous Ossian! She really has no luck, for her Java sparrows died too at the bird show in Edinburgh, because the footman, sent with them, forgot to fill their water glass when it got dry on the journey; a great many people send birds to shows with nobody at all to take care of them, so she feels that she was not to blame in the very least.

  “Why will you show?” says her husband, who is vexed about Ossian; “you don’t want to win and you don’t want to sell.”

  “Oh, everybody does it,” she answers.

  He goes into his study to console himself with a new model of a pole-trap; and she, her canvassing done, runs upstairs to see her gown for the May drawing-room. The train is of quite a new design, embroidered with orchids in natural colors, and fringed with the feathers of the small green parrakeet, a beautiful little bird which has been poisoned by hundreds in the jungles of New Guianea to make the border to this manteau de cour.

  If she were told that she is a more barbaric creature than the squaw of the poor Indian trapper who poisoned the parrakeets, she would be equally astonished and offended.

  Let us now look at her next-door neighbor; he is a very wealthy person and seldom refuses a subscription, thinks private charity pernicious and pauperizing, attends his church regularly, and votes in the House of Commons in favor of pigeon shooting and spurious sports. If any one asks him if he “likes animals,” he answers cheerily, “Oh, dear me, yes. Poor creatures, why not?” But it does not disturb him that the horse in the hansom cab, which he has called to take him to the city, has weals all over its loins, and a bit that fills its mouth with blood and foam; nor does he notice the over-driven and half-starved condition of a herd of cattle being taken from Cannon Street to Smithfield, but only curses them heartily for blocking the traffic.

  He eats a capon, drives behind a gelding, warms himself at a hearth of which the coal has been procured by untold sufferings of man and beast, has his fish crimped, and his lobsters scalded to death in his kitchens, relishes the green fat cut from a living turtle, reads with approbation his head keeper’s account of the last pair of owls on his estate having been successfully trapped, writes to that worthy to turn down two thousand more young pheasants for the autumn shooting, orders his agent to have his young cattle on his home farm dishorned, and buys as a present for his daughters a cardcase made from the shell of a tortoise which was roasted alive, turned on its back on the fire, to give the ruddy glow to its shell. Why not? His favorite preacher and his popular scientist alike assure him that all the subject races are properly sacrificed to man. It is obviously wholly impossible to convince such a person that he is cruel; he merely studies his own convenience, and he has divine and scientific authority for considering that he is perfectly right in doing so. He is quite comfortable, both for time and for eternity. It were easier to change the burglar of the slums, the brigand of the hills, than to change this self-complacent and pachydermatous householder who represents nine-tenths of the ruling classes.

  Let us not mistake; he is not personally a cruel man; he would not himself hurt anything, except in sport which he thinks is legitimate, and in science which he is told is praiseworthy; he is amiable, good-natured, perhaps benevolent, but he is wrapped up in habits, customs, facts, egotisms, tyrannies, which all seem to him to be good, indeed to be essential. His horse is a thing to him like his mail phaeton; his dog is a dummy like his umbrella stand; his cattle are wealth-producing stores like his timber or wheat; he uses them all as he requires, as he uses his hats and gloves. He sees no more unkindness in doing away with any of them than in discarding his old boots, and he passes the most atrocious laws and by-laws for animal torment as cheerfully as he signs a check payable to self.

  His ears are wadded by prejudice, his eyes are blinded by formula, his character is steeped in egotism; you might as well try, I repeat, to touch the heart of the Sicilian brigand or the London crib cracker as to alter his views and opinions; you would speak to him in a language which is as unintelligible to his world as Etruscan to the philologist.

  The majority of his friends, like himself, lead their short, bustling bumptious, and frequently wholly useless lives, purblind always and entirely deaf where anything except their own interests is concerned. They think but very rarely of anything except themselves, and the competitions, ambitions, or jealousies which occupy them. But in their pastimes cruelty is to them acceptable; it is an outlet for the barbarian who sleeps in them, heavily drugged, but not dead; the sight of blood titillates agreeably their own slow circulation.

  Between them and the cad who breaks the back of the bagged rabbit, there is no difference except in the degree of power to indulge the slaughter lust.

  Alas! it were easier “to quarry the granite rock with razors” than to touch the feelings of such as this man, or this woman, where their vanities, or their mere sheep-like love of doing as others do, are in question.