and
shovel underground. The mechanical, monotonous exercise and the
sordidness of his home surroundings foster the germ, and his leisure
moments are occupied with the memory of those glorious times when he was
hitting out at someone, and he feels he would give anything just to
have one more blow. Curse the police! If it were not for them he could
indulge his hobby to the utmost. But the stalwart, officious man in blue
is ever on the scene, and the thrashing of a puny cleric or sawbones is
scarcely compensation for a month's hard labour. Yet his mania must be
satisfied somehow--it worries him to pieces. He must either smash
someone's nose or go mad; there is no alternative, and he chooses the
former. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals prevents
him skinning a cat; the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Children will be down on him at once if he strikes a child, and so he
has no other resource left but his wife--he can knock out all her teeth,
bash in her ribs, and jump on her head to his heart's content. She will
never dare prosecute him, and, if she does, some Humanitarian Society
will be sure to see that he is not legally punished. He thus finds safe
scope for the indulgence of his crank, and when there is nothing left of
his own wife, he turns his unattractive and pusillanimous attentions to
someone else's.

But occult thought-germs of this elementary type only thrive where the
infant's spiritual or unknown brain is wholly undeveloped. Where the
spiritual or unknown brain of an infant is partially developed, the
germ-thought to be lodged in it (especially if it be a germ-thought of
cruelty) must be of a more subtle and refined nature.

I have traced the growth of cruelty obsession in children one would not
suspect of any great tendency to animalism. A refined love of making
others suffer has led them to vent inquisitionary tortures on insects,
and the mania for pulling off the legs of flies and roasting beetles
under spyglasses has been gradually extended to drowning mice in cages
and seeing pigs killed. Time develops the germ; the cruel boy becomes
the callous doctor or "sharp-practising" attorney, and the cruel girl
becomes the cruel mother and often the frail divorcee. Drink and cards
are an obsession with some; cruelty is just as much a matter of
obsession with others. But the ingenuity of the occult brain rises to
higher things; it rises to the subtlest form of invention when dea