349 
PRESIDENT BERGh’s ADDRESS. 
means are practicable, suffers itself to be killed at a distance from 
its beloved progeny ! 
All this seems too much like romance to be real, but to the 
confusion of our race it is true. 
Yes, all this is true—and more; by man’s revolting barbarity 
—aided perhaps by the necessities of his fallen condition—the 
entire animal race fears him, and flees his presence, with well- 
founded apprehension. 
And yet these humble beings do exist, and can better exist 
without us than with us, while we, and all the civilization of 
which we boast, would perish probably in a twelvemonth, were 
they one and all to be extinguished! 
It is a web-ascertained fact, that wherever the horse is not 
found, civilization does not exist. 
If I thus seem to occupy too much of your time with these 
considerations, it is to impress upon your minds, with all the 
force I am able, the great moral responsibility which rests upon 
your profession, of carefully fitting yourselves for the perform¬ 
ance of a task which involves the amelioration or infliction of 
such tremendous sufferings, as well as enormous destruction of 
property, which either ignorance or want of humane feeling 
may entail. 
According to official statistics, fifty millions of animals are 
slaughtered annually in this country for food, exclusive of those 
killed for other purposes. 
In 1870, eighty-five millions of animals labored for our sup¬ 
port, which, estimated in day’s work, at fifty cents per day for 
three hundred days, makes the prodigious total of four hundred 
and twenty-five millions of dollars annually ! But then, gentle¬ 
men, this sum, vast as it is, is only a fraction of the tremendous 
pecuniary benefit these despised and abused creatures procure us, 
and is derived from three races of animals only, to wit: the 
horse, the ox, and the mule. 
It is a fact as strange as it is abhorrent to every sentiment of 
justice and gratitude, that of all the lower animals, the one which 
is most useful, profitable, and indispensible to mankind, is the 
most abused, and that is the horse ! 
