whole dog showing
symptoms of severe distress. That such travellers were not mad we do not
assert--they may have been mad--but they certainly were fatigued; and
the difference, we hope, is often considerable between weariness and
insanity. Dr Kitchiner, had he seen such dogs as we have seen, would
have fainted on the spot. He would have raised the country against the
harmless jog-trotter. Pitchforks would have gleamed in the setting sun,
and the flower of the agricultural youth of a midland county, forming a
levy _en masse_, would have offered battle to a turnspit. The Doctor,
sitting in his coach--like Napoleon at Waterloo--would have cried "_Tout
est perdu--sauve, qui peut!_"--and re-galloping to a provincial town,
would have found refuge under the gateway of the Hen and Chickens.

"The life of the most humble human being," quoth the Doctor, "is of more
value than all the dogs in the world--dare the most brutal cynic say
otherwise?"

This question is not put to us; for so far from being the most brutal
Cynic, we do not belong to the Cynic school at all--being an Eclectic,
and our philosophy composed chiefly of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and
Peripateticism--with a fine, pure, clear, bold dash of Platonicism. The
most brutal Cynic, if now alive and snarling, must therefore answer for
himself--while we tell the Doctor, that so far from holding, with him,
that the life of the most humble human being is of more value than all
the dogs in the world, we, on the contrary, verily believe that there is
many a humble dog whose life far transcends in value the lives of many
men, women, and children. Whether or not dogs have souls, is a question
in philosophy never yet solved; although we have ourselves no doubt on
the subject, and firmly believe that they have souls. But the question,
as put by the Doctor, is not about souls, but about lives; and as the
human soul does not die when the human body does, the death of an old
woman, middle-aged man, or young child, is no such very great calamity,
either to themselves or to the world. Better, perhaps, that all the dogs
now alive should be massacred, to prevent hydrophobia, than that a human
soul should be lost;--but not a single human soul is going to be lost,
although the whole canine species should become insane to-morrow. Now,
would the Doctor have laid one hand on his heart and the other on his
Bible, and taken a solemn oath that rather than that one old woman of a
century and a qua