One does not rough it long in this wicked world without seeing more
cruelty both towards human beings and towards animals than one cares to
think about; but a large proportion of common cruelty comes of
ignorance, bad tradition and uncultured sympathies. Some painful
outbreaks of inhumanity, where one would least expect it, are no doubt
strictly to be accounted for by disease. But over and above these common
and these exceptional instances, one cannot escape the conviction that
irresponsible power is opportunity in all hands and a direct temptation
in some to cruelty, and that it affords horrible development to those
morbid cases in which cruelty becomes a passion.
That there should ever come a thirst for blood in men as well as tigers,
is bad enough but conceivable when linked with deadly struggle, or at
the wild dictates of revenge. But a lust for cruelty growing fiercer by
secret and unchecked indulgence, a hideous pleasure in seeing and
inflicting pain, seems so inhuman a passion that we shrink from
acknowledging that this is ever so.
And if it belonged to the past alone, to barbarous despotisms or to
savage life, one might wisely forget it; for the dark pages of human
history are unwholesome as well as unpleasant reading, unless the mind
be very sane in a body very sound.
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