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money wherewith to pay the taxes. Now, we cannot suppose 

 that our blessed Lord would have instructed his disciple to go 

 and perform a deliberate act of cruelty to obtain an end 

 which — with reverence be it spoken — might have been at- 

 tained in some other way/ 



" How, I would ask, with such an example as this before 

 us, can we talk of the cruelty of the angler's occupation ? 

 Surely this should lead us at least to reconsider the grounds 

 of our own prejudices. 



" I hope it will not be supposed that the opinions I have 

 advanced in the preceding essay have a tendency to promote, 

 in any form, the practice of torture ; as such a conclusion 

 would be as melancholy as it would be unjust. No one, I be- 

 lieve, would sacrifice any creature the oftener, because he 

 believed it could not feel, or indulge his splenetic humours 

 in victimizing cockchafers, because they did not care for it. 



" It appears to me that the idea should have a far different 

 tendency. We cannot look around us without seeing a con- 

 stant warfare carried on throughout nature, from the man who 

 wars with his neighbour, to the microscopic animalcule which 

 feeds on others more minute than itself. 



" If all these wars were necessarily attended with great 

 suffering, proportionate, it is true, to the size and relative 

 position of the creatures, but still equal to that entailed on 

 man, how painful would be the bare idea that such things 

 were going on. 



" How much more consolatory the thought, that each annual 

 is endowed with sensibility according to the position in which 

 it is placed ; and that pain, as such, is not felt by those who, 

 for the most part, are unable to avoid or to escape from it. 



"No later than a few days ago, I was conversing with a 

 gentleman who had almost entirely given up a favourite 

 amusement of gardening, because his sensitive mind could not 

 bear to contemplate the amount of suffering he was entailing 

 upon the worms, whose writhings were perceptible whenever 



