2 TftE BEGINNER IN POULTRY 



that this is the case, what is the difference of tempera- 

 ment or of feeling which draws a man to the one or the 

 other? And why should the one elevate the character 

 of the men who follow it, while the other (as is asserted) 

 tends to do just the reverse ? 



Both these occupations lead man closer to Nature. 

 But, in the one, he handles and creates new forms with 

 living things which have not feeling or response ; in the 

 other, he controls as far as a human being may 

 living things which are sentient, and which have what 

 we may term "personalities " which respond to him, and 

 which communicate with him to a considerable degree. 

 This, it seems to me, is the fundamental difference, and 

 this difference is what makes the difference in the effect 

 upon man himself. This is because, if a man does not 

 deal out justice and kindness to sentient things, he 

 becomes, in the very nature of things, the less a higher 

 being. This morning, a ten-year-old lad passed my door, 

 angrily whipping an old horse lagging in the spell of 

 unprecedented heat; yesterday, a farmer's daughter 

 soused a too-persistent sitting hen in water till the bird 

 was nearly drowned, to " break " her of the natural im- 

 pulse. These- common occurrences are unjust, and, be- 

 cause unjust, they are callousing. And there are scores of 

 ways in which man may, and does, make callous and bru- 

 talize himself, in dealing with the living things subject 

 to his will. This does not affect these animals alone, for 

 calluses grow and fester, and the man who is cruel to his 

 stock becomes insensibly cruel to his wife and children. 



I have spoken at the outset of sympathy as a necessary 

 factor in the successful handling of sentient things. 

 This sympathy will not be shown, in the majority of 



