n familiar with the
taking away of life, even when it is done with a good degree of
tenderness, cannot have a very happy effect. But, when this is done, not
only without tenderness or sympathy, but often with manifestations of
great pleasure, and when children, as in some cases, are almost
constant witnesses of such scenes, how dreadful must be the results!

In this view, the world, I mean our own portion of it, sometimes seems
to me like one mighty slaughter-house--one grand school for the
suppression of every kind, and tender, and brotherly feeling--one grand
process of education to the entire destitution of all moral
principle--one vast scene of destruction to all moral sensibility, and
all sympathy with the woes of those around us. Is it not so?

I have seen many boys who shuddered, at first, at the thought of taking
the life, even of a snake, until compelled to it by what they conceived
to be duty; and who shuddered still more at taking the life of a lamb, a
calf, a pig, or a fowl. And yet I have seen these same boys, in
subsequent life, become so changed, that they could look on such scenes
not merely with indifference, but with gratification. Is this change of
feeling desirable? How long is it after we begin to look with
indifference on pain and suffering in brutes, before we begin to be less
affected than before by human suffering?

I am not ignorant that sentiments like these are either regarded as
morbid, and therefore pitiable, or as affected, and therefore
ridiculous. Who that has read the story of Anthony Benezet, as related
by Dr. Rush, has not smiled at what he must have regarded a feeling
wholly misplaced, if nothing more? And yet it was a feeling which I
think is very far from deserving ridicule, however homely the manner of
expressing it. But I have related this interesting story in another part
of the work.

I am not prepared to maintain, strongly, the old-fashioned doctrine,
that a butcher who commences his employment at adult age, is necessarily
rendered hardhearted or unfeeling; or, that they who eat flesh have
their sensibilities deadened, and their passions inflamed by it--though
I am not sure that there is not some truth in it. I only maintain, that
to render children familiar with the taking away of animal
life,--especially the lives of our own domestic animals, often endeared
to us by many interesting circumstances of their history, or of our own,
in relation to them,--cannot be otherwise