powerful and wide-spread influence for
good. They awakened religious feelings among the people, and diffused
a new earnestness among the clergy. A spirit of philanthropy was born
with their teachings which has gone on growing until it now extends a
protecting arm even to brutes. The societies for the prevention of
cruelty to children and to animals are part of a great philanthropic
movement which began at the end of the eighteenth century, which has
carried into practical, every-day life the spirit of Christianity, and
has given to the words mercy and charity, the signification of real and
existing virtues. Horses, dogs, even rats, are now more safe from
wanton brutality than great numbers of men and women in the eighteenth
century. To any one who studies that period, the stocks, the whipping
post, the gibbet, cock fights, prize-fights, bull-baitings, accounts of
rapes, are simply the outward signs of an all-pervading cruelty. If he
opens a novel, he finds that the story turns on brutality in one form
or other. It is not only in such novels as those of Fielding and
Smollett, which are intended to describe the lower classes of society,
and in which blackened eyes and broken heads are relished forms of wit,
that the modern reader is offended by the continual infliction of pain.
Goldsmith gives Squire Thornhill perfect impunity from the law and from
public opinion in his crimes. Mackenzie does not think of visiting any
legal retribution on his "Man of the World." Godwin wrote "Caleb
Williams" to show with what impunity man preyed on man, how powerless
the tenant and the dependent woman lay before the violence or the
intrigue of the rich. And it is not only that a crime should be
committed with perfect security which would now receive a severe
sentence at the hands of an ordinary judge and jury which surprises the
reader of to-day, but that scenes which would now shock any person of
common humanity or taste, were, in the last century, especially
intended to amuse. In Miss Burney's "Evelina," Captain Mirvan
continually insults and maltreats Mme. Duval, the grandmother of the
heroine, in a manner which would not only be inconceivable in a
gentleman tolerated in society, but in a blackguard, not entirely
bereft of feelings of decency or good-nature. While she is a guest in
his own house, he torments her with false accounts of the sufferings of
a friend; sends her on a futile errand to relieve those sufferings in a
carriage of