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 all over again. 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 



