e tortures
inflicted on the post-horse a century ago, is almost incredible to us,
and we flatter ourselves that such things would not be tolerated now.
But we must get over the ground somehow, and I take it that but for the
invention of other more rapid means of transit the present generation
would be as little concerned at the pains of the post-horse as they
are at the horrors enacted behind the closed doors of the physiological
laboratories, the atrocity of the steel trap, the continual murdering by
our big game hunters of all the noblest animals left on the globe, and
finally the annual massacre of millions of beautiful birds in their
breeding time to provide ornaments for the hats of our women.

"Come forth he must," says Bloomfield, when he describes how the
flogged horse at length gains the end of the stage and, "trembling under
complicated pains," when "every nerve a separate anguish knows," he is
finally unharnessed and led to the stable door, but has scarcely tasted
food and rest before he is called for again.

Though limping, maimed and sore;
He hears the whip; the chaise is at the door...
The collar tightens and again he feels
His half-healed wounds inflamed; again the wheels
With tiresome sameness in his ears resound
O'er blinding dust or miles of flinty ground.

This is over and done with simply because the post-horse is no longer
wanted, and we have to remember that no form of cruelty inflicted,
whether for sport or profit or from some other motive, on the lower
animals has ever died out of itself in the land. Its end has invariably
been brought about by legislation through the devotion of men who were
the "cranks," the "faddists," the "sentimentalists," of their day, who
were jeered and laughed at by their fellows, and who only succeeded by
sheer tenacity and force of character after long fighting against public
opinion and a reluctant Parliament, in finally getting their law.

Bloomfield's was but a small voice crying in the wilderness, and he was
indeed a small singer in the day of our greatest singers. As a poet he
was not worthy to unloose the buckles of their shoes; but he had one
thing in common with the best and greatest, the feeling of tender love
and compassion for the lower animals which was in Thomson and Cowper,
but found its highest expression in his own great contemporaries,
Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth. In virtue of this feeling he was of
their