life wasted by carelessness or cruelty. I felt inclined to get up and
address to him the following lucid question: "If when you spare a
herring you are only being oikonomikal, for what oikos are you being
nomikal?" But in an average debating club I thought this question might
not be quite clear; so I abandoned the idea. But certainly it is not
plain for whom Bernard Shaw is economising if he rescues a rhinoceros
from an early grave. But the truth is that Shaw only took this economic
pose from his hatred of appearing sentimental. If Bernard Shaw killed a
dragon and rescued a princess of romance, he would try to say "I have
saved a princess" with exactly the same intonation as "I have saved a
shilling." He tries to turn his own heroism into a sort of superhuman
thrift. He would thoroughly sympathise with that passage in his
favourite dramatic author in which the Button Moulder tells Peer Gynt
that there is a sort of cosmic housekeeping; that God Himself is very
economical, "and that is why He is so well to do."

This combination of the widest kindness and consideration with a
consistent ungraciousness of tone runs through all Shaw's ethical
utterance, and is nowhere more evident than in his attitude towards
animals. He would waste himself to a white-haired shadow to save a shark
in an aquarium from inconvenience or to add any little comforts to the
life of a carrion-crow. He would defy any laws or lose any friends to
show mercy to the humblest beast or the most hidden bird. Yet I cannot
recall in the whole of his works or in the whole of his conversation a
single word of any tenderness or intimacy with any bird or beast. It was
under the influence of this high and almost superhuman sense of duty
that he became a vegetarian; and I seem to remember that when he was
lying sick and near to death at the end of his _Saturday Review_ career
he wrote a fine fantastic article, declaring that his hearse ought to be
drawn by all the animals that he had not eaten. Whenever that evil day
comes there will be no need to fall back on the ranks of the brute
creation; there will be no lack of men and women who owe him so much as
to be glad to take the place of the animals; and the present writer for
one will be glad to express his gratitude as an elephant. There is no
doubt about the essential manhood and decency of Bernard Shaw's
instincts in such matters. And quite apart from the vegetarian
controversy, I do not doubt that the beasts als