followers in camp with him—a ragamuffin army
who often enough lack provisions, and who are
always a terrible infliction on the surrounding
country where the royal tents are pitched.

MAN AND HIS BEASTS.

The law of animal value is its usefulness, not
to the world in general, but to man. We do
not keep creatures alive from any weak ideas of
their right to existence on their own account,
but simply because they are pleasing to us or
profitable—sure to be pleasing when unprofitable,
else they would soon be put an end to—
and therefore to be retained in the roll-call of
animated nature. If cats had nothing to do but
to eat rats, and rats had nothing to do but to
be eaten by cats—if there were no babyless
spinsters to make domestic pets, or wifeless
bachelors who like to have a sleek and stealthy
puss softly purring on their knees—we would
soon exterminate both cats and rats, no matter
what their own private views on the subject of
individual rights. But the quality of petableness
being, of itself, a beast's service to man,
we retain our breed of tabbies carefully; and
would do so, even if all the rats and mice were
to vanish into ghost-land, if no mock pigs passed
through the sausage-mill, and if sable were as
cheap as cat skin.

If cows and horses had no food or help in
them, should we have them rioting over our
fields, or bellowing through our woods? No.
Though they were as harmless as sheep, we
should hunt them down as we hunt down lions
and tigers, grudging them every mouthful
of meadow-grass or of fresh tree-top, and
putting them out of the way as if they were
natural burglars or the very pickpockets of
creation. We say hunt them down like lions
and tigers; but these, and other furry beasts of
prey, are in a manner amiably cherished, as
affording good sport to muscular Indian officers
when alive, and pleasant hearthrugs when they
are dead. We write sounding paragraphs on
the ferocity and evil morals of these furry beasts
of prey, and seem to consider it an awful wrong
to humanity that they should have ever been
developed by the law of gradual progress out
of the flinty diatoms; but we should find a
great void if they were gone; those of us, at
least, who love adventure and live in hot
climates. When the last of the lions has fallen
before the rifle of some future Jules Gerard, a
"Society for the better selection of the Felidæ"
will be started immediately, and a few generations
of careful breeding will see grandmamma's
tprtoiseshell rapidly approximating to the Bengal
tiger, the leopard, the cheetah, and the puma of
past times, to the infinite satisfaction of the
crack shots. Look at foxes: of what earthly
use are they to the working world? As neighbours,
they are troublesome and destructive;
they rob the henwife's roost and the farmer's
barn-yard; their flesh is uneatable; certainly
their fur is of some marketable value, according
to circumstances, though not of much worth here
in England; but the extinction of the tribe
would be a day of national mourning, and, in
the hunting counties, you might as well assassinate
a man as slaughter a dog-fox ignobly.
This is one instance of the mere pleasure of men
being sufficient cause for animal preservation.
On the other hand, snakes, let us say, have no
uses beyond supplying the Zoological Gardens
with objects of curious interest; so, snakes are
killed without mercy and vilified without
reserve. Who has a good word for them? Who
goes to hunt them with a flourish of trumpets
accompanying, or a skin preserved and hung up
for trophy? No one. Yet if the skin could be
made into any kind of useful or ornamental
appendage—if the hunting included glory as well
as risk—if, when slain and slaughtered, snakes
could be fricasséed into food, or boiled down
into a manufacturing necessity, like horns and
hoofs—we should have snake-hunters, as now we
have lion and fox and boar-hunters, and they
would be bred with care to be destroyed with
honour. It all depends on the amount of
personal capital to be got out of anything of the
kind, whether men protect or exterminate. On
the banks of the Mississippi, where fried rattlesnake,
or Musical Jack, is by no means an
uncommon dish, or one disesteemed by intelligent
palates, and where, consequently, a national
depopulation of rattlesnakes would be a heavy local
loss, they are rarely destroyed out of pure malice
by the hunters, but only killed, as one kills cows
and fowls, for sake of the roast and boiled--
which is fair slaughter all the world over.

It is so with everything. Jotting down
one's thoughts as they arise, and not caring for
sequence or the relation of the natural orders,
let us take a few examples nearer home.
There are the moles. Why are the poor old
fellows pursued, as we pursue them, with such
unrelenting ferocity? Merely because they
make our lawns and gardens look untidy! Not
for the sake of their fur, which yet is sleek
and beautiful enough for the daintiest wearer;
not for any phosphorus, or gelatine, or albumen,
or osmazome, that may be in bones or body; but
only because they throw up unsightly tracks
across our grounds, and we choose to kill them
rather than submit to their runs. Now, is this
fair? Has not old Sleekcoat as much right to
the underground passages as we have? And is it
just to murder him because we do not like his
way of walking? Toads, again, have long
laboured under an evil name, and one-half of the
Ishmaelite curse; but since it has been
discovered that they are rather friendly than
otherwise to man, and help him in the matters of
gardening and insectivorism, a reaction has set in,
and they are now cried up and petted and made
much of and left unmolested save by the boys,
those general torments of the world. But they
lave been awfully mauled and mishandled in the
past, grievously abused, and shamelessly
slandered; all because men did not like their looks,
and so talked the nonsense of fear: which is
about the biggest nonsense of all the
nonsense said and sung. Hedgehogs are also