ng persons in the circle of my
acquaintance. I have watched myself. The result has confirmed the
opinion I have just expressed. No child, I think, can walk through a
common market or slaughter-house without receiving moral injury; nor am
I quite sure that any virtuous adult can.

How have I been struck with the change produced in the young mind by
that merriment which often accompanies the slaughter of an innocent
fowl, or lamb, or pig! How can the Christian, with the Bible in hand,
and the merciful doctrines of its pages for his text,

"Teach me to feel another's woe,"

--the beast's not excepted--and yet, having laid down that Bible, go at
once from the domestic altar to make light of the convulsions and exit
of a poor domestic animal?

Is it said, that these remarks apply only to the _abuse_ of a thing,
which, in its place, is proper? Is it said, that there is no necessity
of levity on these occasions? Grant that there is none; still the result
is almost inevitable. But there is, in any event, one way of avoiding,
or rather preventing both the abuse and the occasion for abuse, by
ceasing to kill animals for food; and I venture to predict that the evil
never will be prevented otherwise.

The usual apology for hunting and fishing, in all their various and
often cruel forms,--whereby so many of our youth, from the setters of
snares for birds, and the anglers for trout, to the whalemen, are
educated to cruelty, and steeled to every virtuous and holy
sympathy,--is, the necessity of the animals whom we pursue for food. I
know, indeed, that this is not, in most cases, the true reason, but it
is the reason given--it is the substance of the reason. It serves as an
apology. They who make it may often be ignorant of the true reason, or
they or others may wish to conceal it; and, true to human nature, they
are ready to give every reason for their conduct, but the real and most
efficient one.

It must not, indeed, be concealed that there is one more apology usually
made for these cruel sports; and made too, in some instances, by good
men; I mean, by men whose intentions are in the main pure and excellent.
These sports are healthy, they tell us. They are a relief to mind and
body. Perhaps no good man, in our own country, has defended them with
more ingenuity, or with more show of reason and good sense, than Dr.
Comstock, in his recent popular work on Human Physiology. And yet, there
is scarcely a single advantage which