"CAPARISONS ARE ODOROUS."
[To THE EDITOR 07 THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—Mrs. Malaprop's dictum has seldom been more applicable than to the persistent efforts of certain people to place in. antagonism two charities which are essentially one in spirit, and emphatically so in their results, the Societies for Preventing Cruelty to Children and to Animals. Your correspondent, "A Subscriber to Both Societies," is very kindly disposed, but he takes the stick by the wrong end in offering apologies for the large funds of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ; and I am disappointed to find no other zoophilist has answered the challenge in your article of the previous week on Children's Protection, wherein the writer observed magnanimously that he "has nothing to say" against people who subscribe to Societies for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ! I should think not, indeed ; and in the columns of the Spectator of all places ! Cannot such good folk see that all cruelty, whether to men, women, children, beasts, or birds, is essentially one and the same devilish vice ; and that to check and punish it in one case, is to check it in all ? It is as absurd to set up an opposition and rivalry between two efforts to stop cruelty (whether directed to one class of objects or to another), as to set up such rivalry between laws to punish larceny, and laws to punish robbery; or to blame a teacher for whipping a boy for lying, when there is perjury going on in the next police-court. Cruelty to animals is the day-school of all cruelty ; and the lessons learned therein rarely fail to be applied sooner or later by the scholars to their hapless wives and miserable children. On the other hand, humanity and gentleness instilled into the young towards every sentient creature necessarily lift them thenceforth above the level of that brutality wherein child-torture in after years offers any attraction.
The real comparison—if comparison must be made between
subscriptions for one benevolent object and those for another —is not (I submit) between giving money to Mr. Waugh's Society on one hand, or to the Royal Society for the Preven- tion of Cruelty to Animals and the Victoria Street Society on the other, but between giving money to protect some children, from atrocious suffering and wrongs, and giving it to afford other chiklren toys and tea-parties. But we zoophilists bear Mrs. Malaprop in mind, and have no inclination to animad- vert jealously, even on the interminable distributions of stale buns and plum-bread at village school-feasts !—I am, Sir, &c., [We were not aware that we in any way deprecated the most earnest support of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. To say that the newer Society ought to receive as much support as the older Society is not to suggest that any should be drained away from the older Society. Quite the contrary.—En. Spectator.]
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