dog she would perhaps have wished that it was not the custom of her sex
to seal the certificate of merit with a kiss.

In all this absurd woman's statements, thus fairly epitomized, there
is not one that is true--not one of which the essential falsity is not
evident, obvious, conspicuous to even the most delinquent observation.
Yet with the smartness and smirk of a graduating seminary girl refuting
Epicurus she marshals them against the awful truth that every year in
Europe and the United States alone more than five thousand human beings
the of hydrophobia--a fact which her controversial conscience does not
permit her to mention. The names on this needless death-roll are mostly
those of children, the sins of whose parents in cherishing their own
hereditary love of dogs is visited upon their children because they have
not the intelligence and agility to get out of the way. Or perhaps they
lack that tranquil courage upon which Miss Guiney relies to avert the
canine tooth from her own inedible shank.

Finally this amusing illogician, this type and example of the female
controversialist, has the hardihood to hope that there may be fathers
who can see their children the the horrible death of hydrophobia without
wishing "to exile man's best ideal of fidelity from the hearthstones of
civilization." If we must have an "ideal of fidelity" why not find it,
not in the dog that kills the child, but in the father that kills the
dog. The profit of maintaining a standard and pattern of the virtues (at
considerable expense in the case of this insatiable canine consumer) may
be great, but are we so hard pushed that we must go to the animals for
it? In life and letters are there no men and women whose names kindle
enthusiasm and emulation? Is fidelity, is devotion, is self-sacrifice
unknown among ourselves? As a model of the higher virtues why will not
one's mother serve at a pinch? And what is the matter with Miss Guiney
herself? She is faithful, at least to dogs, whatever she may be to
the hundreds of American children inevitably foredoomed to a death of
unthinkable agony.

There is perhaps a hope that when the sun's returning flame shall gild
the hither end of the thirtieth century this savage and filthy brute,
the dog, will have ceased to "banquet on through a whole year" of human
fat and lean; that he will have been gathered to his variously unworthy
fathers to give an account of the deeds done in body of man. In the
meantime, t