28 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
the pain of a wounded bird without a twinge, and seldom 
wasted any material secured at the cost of a bird’s life. I 
made it a rule to preserve the skins of all birds I shot, ex- 
cepting such as I killed for the table, and I presume there 
are to this day few large museums of the world which do 
not contain some specimens of my handiwork as a taxider- 
mist. I never thought, and do not now think, that there 
was anything wrong in this destruction of bird-life, great as 
it certainly was ; it seemed necessary to proper and laudable 
ends; yet I should not like to do it alloveragain. Perhaps 
this is because there is no occasion for me to repeat my 
individual experiences, having learned what birds had to 
teach me at such a fearful cost to them; and certainly I 
should be the last to condemn in another the practices of 
which I have myself been guilty. This painful subject 
raises a large question, which each one must decide for 
himself, according to his own conscience. I am sure that 
no intimate knowledge of the science of ornithology can be 
had without killing birds for the purpose of examining their 
dead bodies; and if it be right to kill and eat to nourish 
our own bodies, it is not wrong to slay to slake our thirst 
for knowledge. This is a case in which the end seems to 
justify the means, and certainly it can make no difference to 
the bird that has been killed whether its poor body be eaten, 
or its skin be stuffed, or the whole be thrown away. The 
difference in this case would seem to be far more serious, for 
it affects a living human being, and not a dead bird. ‘The 
moral quality of every human action resides in the motive, 
purpose and intention of the doer; if these be right, the 
result can hardly be wrong, though it may turn out to be a 
very sad necessity. If familiarity with suffering, through 
habitual infliction of pain and death, should result in callous- 
ness even, to say nothing of its possible ending in wanton 
cruelty from sheer love of inflicting pain, the person so 
affected becomes the victim of a moral degradation so pro- 
found, that it were far better he should never know anything 
