The Map of Life. William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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Название: The Map of Life
Автор: William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4057664612021
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The fatal vice of ill-considered benevolence is that it looks only to proximate and immediate results without considering either alternatives or distant and indirect consequences. A large and highly respectable form of benevolence is that connected with the animal world, and in England it is carried in some respects to a point which is unknown on the Continent. But what a strange form of compassion is that which long made it impossible to establish a Pasteur Institute in England, obliging patients threatened with one of the most horrible diseases that can afflict mankind to go—as they are always ready to do—to Paris, in order to undergo a treatment which what is called the humane sentiment of Englishmen forbid them to receive at home! What a strange form of benevolence is that which in a country where field sports are the habitual amusement of the higher ranks of Society denounces as criminal even the most carefully limited and supervised experiments on living animals, and would thus close the best hope of finding remedies for some of the worst forms of human suffering, the one sure method of testing supposed remedies which may be fatal or which may be of incalculable benefit to mankind! Foreign critics, indeed, often go much further and believe that in other forms connected with this subject public opinion in England is strangely capricious and inconsistent. They compare with astonishment the sentences that are sometimes passed for the ill-treatment of a woman and for the ill-treatment of a cat; they ask whether the real sufferings caused by many things that are in England punished by law or reprobated by opinion are greater than those caused by sports which are constantly practised without reproach; and they are apt to find much that is exaggerated or even fantastic in the great popularity and elaboration of some animal charities.[10] At the same time in our own country the more recognised field sports greatly trouble many benevolent natures. I will here only say that while the positive benefits they produce are great and manifest, those who condemn them constantly forget what would be the fate of the animals that are slaughtered if such sports did not exist, and how little the balance of suffering is increased or altered by the destruction of beings which themselves live by destroying. As a poet says—
The fish exult whene'er the seagull dies,
The salmon's death preserves a thousand flies.
On most of these questions the effect on human character is a more important consideration than the effect on animal happiness. The best thing that legislation can do for wild animals is to extend as far as possible to harmless classes a close time, securing them immunity while they are producing and supporting their young. This is the truest kindness, and on quite other grounds it is peculiarly needed, as the improvement of firearms and the increase of population have completely altered, as far as man is concerned, the old balance between production and destruction, and threaten, if unchecked, to lead to an almost complete extirpation of great classes of the animal world. It is melancholy to observe how often sensitive women who object to field sports and who denounce all experiments on living animals will be found supporting with perfect callousness fashions that are leading to the wholesale destruction of some of the most beautiful species of birds, and are in some cases dependent upon acts of very aggravated cruelty.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Seneca, De Vita Beata.
[9] Burke's Correspondence, i. 376, 377.
[10] As I am writing these pages I find the following paragraph in a newspaper which may illustrate my meaning:—'DOGS' NURSING. A case was heard at the Brompton County Court on Friday in which some suggestive evidence was given of the medical treatment of dogs. The proprietor of a dogs' infirmary at Tattersall's Corner sued Mr. Harding Cox for the board and lodging of seven dogs, and the régime was explained. They are fed on essence of meat, washed down with port wine, and have as a digestive eggs beaten up in milk and arrowroot. Medicated baths and tonics are also supplied, and occasionally the animals are treated to a day in the country. This course of hygiene necessitated an expenditure of ten shillings a week. The defendant pleaded that the charges were excessive, but the judge awarded the plaintiff £25. How many hospital patients receive such treatment?'—Daily Express, February 16, 1897.
CHAPTER V
The illustrations given in the last chapter will be sufficient to show the danger of permitting the unselfish side of human nature to run wild without serious control by the reason and by the will. To see things in their true proportion, to escape the magnifying influence of a morbid imagination, should be one of the chief aims of life, and in no fields is it more needed than in those we have been reviewing. At the same time every age has its own ideal moral type towards which the strongest and best influences of the time converge. The history of morals is essentially a history of the changes that take place not so much in our conception of what is right and wrong as in the proportionate place and prominence we assign to different virtues and vices. There are large groups of moral qualities which in some ages of the world's history have been regarded as of supreme importance, while in other ages they are thrown into the background, and there are corresponding groups of vices which are treated in some periods as very serious and in others as very trivial. The heroic type of Paganism and the saintly type of Christianity in its purest form, consist largely of the same elements, but the proportions in which they are mixed are altogether different. There are ages when the military and civic virtues—the qualities that make good soldiers and patriotic citizens—dominate over all others. The self-sacrifice of the best men flows habitually in these channels. In such an age integrity in business relations and the domestic virtues which maintain the purity of the family may be highly valued, but they are chiefly valued because they are essential to the well-being of the State. The soldier who has attained to the highest degree the best qualities of his profession, the patriot who sacrifices to the services of the State his comforts, his ambitions and his life, is the supreme model, and the estimation in which he is held is but little lowered even though he may have been guilty, like Cato, of atrocious cruelty to his slaves, or, like some of the heroes of ancient times, of scandalous forms of private profligacy.
There are other ages in which military life is looked upon by moralists with disfavour, and in which patriotism ranks very low in the scale of virtues, while charity, gentleness, self-abnegation, devotional habits, and purity in thought, word and act are pre-eminently inculcated. The intellectual virtues, again, which СКАЧАТЬ