before these wounds were healed. Sixteen months of suffering did this animal experience in less than two years."

But of all the humble ministers to our convenience, next to the horse the ass seems to be the most generally devoted to hardship, hunger, and abuse. There are few to pity, and none to help him. In reference to the treatment both of the horse and ass, under peculiar circumstances favourable to the amusement of the one party, and the avarice of the other, a benevolent writer observes:

"I have often felt inexpressible anguish when, during a temporary stay at a fashionable wateringplace, I have witnessed the habits of cruelty induced in children by the indiscriminate loose given to every heedless requisition of caprice and passion on living nature, by the unrestrained indulgence of acts of barbarity. For the pastime of every little lordling of the creation, whom the fondness of anxious parents, or the easiness of unreflecting ones, brings to the sea-side, the horse, the ass, is instantly called to his door. It appears in a suffering state-bleeding, lame, blind-no matter-the ready driver assures him it is perfectly at its ease, that though it cannot stand it will go like the

light. The exhausted animal being slow to move, the young rider is told that it is sulky, and then both rider and driver will proceed to cure his obstinacy with their blows."

A case is reported from Union Hall of two miscreants who had ridden a donkey all round a field, until it fell from exhaustion. They commenced beating it with sticks, and then tore out the poor beast's tongue, and otherwise mutilated it. This occurred in November, 1836. In the same report there is another instance of nearly equal barbarity. But it is the daily suffering from being ill-fed, and worked beyond his strength, which are the sad allotment of this animal, as the servant of the poor, that calls for benevolent interference. "I am inclined," says Mr. Batson, in the speech already quoted, "to attribute a great deal of the cruelty at present practised to the poverty of the people, and to the competition which exists in every quarter. Owing to this competition, poor people are driven to make greater exertions to earn a subsistence, and these exertions are principally obtained from the animals under their charge."

A new species of cruelty has lately been called into existence, of a very brutal character, and is

chiefly perpetrated by the most ignorant and ferocious of the community, the semi-barbarians of the social state-the very refuse of its depravity-who are without reputation, and below every incentive which might lead to its formation. We refer to the most faithful and affectionate of our domestic animals, the dog, employed in a wasting drudgery, for which he is totally unfitted by nature, and which renders his life one lengthened period of scarcely mitigated torture. The vehicles heavily laden, which these oppressed creatures are compelled to draw; the strenuous efforts to which they are urged to keep pace even with the horse, in harness, following his natural occupation; the privations they endure, the hunger, the burning thirst through the weary day, in the hottest season of the year, to which they are exposed; and the apathy of their brutal tyrants, who often coolly take their place in the cart, which of itself would be more than a sufficient drag-chain upon their speed, which, however, they are forced to continue thus additionally burthened till they arrive at home.

That we may not render ourselves liable to the charge of exaggeration, one fact we will state, taken from many similar ones, of daily occurrence,

from the Report of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, for 1836. It is sufficiently revolting to the feelings of humanity, but it is by no means the worst that might be adduced. A ruffian, with whose name we shall not pollute our pages, was convicted by Mr. Jeremy, and fined for excessive cruelty to a dog. The defendant and another person were seated in a cart, and were urging the dog on at a rate of twelve or fourteen miles an hour, down Grove-lane, Camberwell, till the dog, completely exhausted, dropped!

weight in the cart was upwards of 500lbs.

The

Such facts as these, and we cannot pass along the streets without being disgusted by them, incontestably show that the worst outrages on humanity are perpetrated in the most highly civilised metropolis in the world, and that civilisation alone for the most part leaves them unchecked and unpunished.

But the widest field of cruelty remains to be explored. It is that where human appetite or luxurious indulgence devotes various species of animals to supply the necessaries and delicacies of the table. There are several aspects under which the cruelties, which furnish our provisions and our

luxuries, may be contemplated. Those which regard the modes of inflicting death, and those which precede and are contributory to that event.

If any creatures have a claim upon us for gentle and humane treatment while they live, and for a death inflicted with the least possible pain, when necessity demands the sacrifice, they are surely those that minister to our sustenance. Yet these endure the greatest possible degree of torture from human hands. Dr. Chalmers speaks of "the dreadful mysteries of a slaughter-house," and of those lingering deaths which many an animal has to undergo for the gratification of a refined epicurism; and he observes, "it were surely most desirable that the duties, if they be so called, of a most revolting trade, were all of them got over with the least possible expense of suffering; nor do we ever feel so painfully the impression of a lurking cannibalism in our nature, as when we think of the intense study which has been given to the connexion between modes of killing and the flavour or delicacy of those viands which are served up to the mild and pacific, and gentle-looking creatures, who form the grace and the ornament of our polished society."