It is to be regretted that so distinguished a writer as Mr. G. K. Chesterton should have given countenance to the idea that an assertion of the rights of animals implies a denial of the rights of man. “I use the word humanitarian,” he says (in his book “Orthodoxy,”) “in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity.” This strange blunder of supposing that we humanitarians regard the interests of humans and sub-humans as antagonistic to each other seems to arise from a misunderstanding of our statement that, in the spread of humane feelings, there is a gradual, not immediate, recognition of kinship, embracing first the family, then the fellow citizen, then the slave, and then the non-human race—a progressive sense of morality which is thus ridiculed by Mr. Chesterton:
“I think it wrong to sit on a man. Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse. Eventually (I suppose,) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair. That is the drive of the argument.... A perpetual tendency, to touch fewer and fewer things might, one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children.”
[111]Mr. Chesterton, it will be seen, supposes that the trend of humanitarian thought is merely “to touch fewer and fewer things”—to “touch,” that is, with the whip, the hob-nailed boot, the hunting-knife, the scalpel, or the pole-axe. He wholly fails to see that what we really desire is to “touch” not fewer and fewer things, but more and more—i.e., to get into touch with them by virtue of that sympathetic intelligence which shows us that they are akin to ourselves. Why, ultimately, do we object to such practices as vivisection, blood-sport, and the butchery of animals for food? Because of the cruelty involved in them, no doubt; but also, and even more, because of the hideous narrowing of our own human sympathies and human pleasures which these savage customs involve.
Let Mr. Chesterton imagine the existence of an ogreish race of men so powerful that wherever one of them appeared, all ordinary mortals would be fain to run at full speed into holes and corners to escape him. Would these tyrants find it to be a diminution, and not rather a vast increase, of their enjoyment, if they learnt gradually “to touch fewer and fewer things” in the ogreish sense, while they touched more and more in the sense of brotherhood and friendship? Precisely the same in kind, though not, of course, in degree, is the relation, as apprehended by humanitarians, of man towards the lower animals.
Equally erroneous is Mr. Chesterton’s assumption that mankind is, in some special and exclusive sense, a “society,” different in kind, and not in degree only, from the lower races.
“Mankind is not a tribe of animals to which we owe compassion. Mankind is a club to which we owe our subscription. Pity, the vague sentiment of the sunt lacrymæ rerum, is due indisputably to everything that lives. And as regards this, the difference between our pity for suffering men and our pity for suffering animals is very possibly only a question of degree. But[112] the difference between our moral relation to men and to animals is not a difference of degree in the least. It is a difference of kind. What we owe to a human being we owe to a fellow-member of a fixed, responsible, and reciprocal society.... This is the basic error upon which all Mr. Salt’s school goes wrong. They will not see that when we talk of human superiority we do not mean superiority in a degree on an inclined plane; we mean the existence of a certain definite society, different from everything else, and founded not on the sorrows of all living, but on the rights of men. Cruelty to man and cruelty to animals are two quite detestable, but quite different, sins.... The man who breaks a cat’s back breaks a cat’s back. The man who breaks a man’s back breaks an implied treaty. The tyrant to animals is a tyrant. The tyrant to men is a traitor. Nay, he is a rebel, for man is royal.”[58]
Mankind, says Mr. Chesterton, is a society. But so are bees and beavers. There are innumerable societies, and it is impossible to prove that human society is more organic or more conclusive than the rest. Our sense of kinship is continually widening, and there never has been, nor is, any finality in the social bond of which Mr. Chesterton speaks. It would have surprised the Greek or Roman of old to be informed that he was a member of the same society with the barbarian or the slave. It would hardly be admitted by the white American of to-day that he and the African negro are own brethren. That, presumably, is because their sympathies are not yet developed enough to enable them to see even the fact of human kinship; but what if Mr. Chesterton’s sympathies are not developed enough to enable him to see what many less subtle intellects have already seen—that beyond this “human” society there is the still larger society of the higher sentient existence.
“The man who breaks a cat’s back breaks a cat’s back.” This terse saying contains the root of all cruelty to animals,[113] the quintessence of all the anthropocentric bigotry which has caused the immemorial ill-usage of the non-human races through the length and breadth of the world. “The man who breaks a cat’s back breaks a cat’s back.” Yes, and the scientist who vivisects a dog, vivisects a dog; the sportsman who breaks up a hare breaks up a hare; the butcher who bleeds a calf bleeds a calf. That is all. And if one points out the cruelty, injustice, and folly of vivisection, or sport, or flesh-eating, appeal is instantly made to the vaunted fact that man is “royal” and the human race “a society”!