a few years was extraordinary. In such of the districts as they had chosen for the scene of their experiment, the Indians had enclosed and cultivated portions of the ground; had reconciled themselves in a great measure to labour, and derived a considerable part of their subsistence from the soil. To pursue this plan, would be to associate with the idea of Christianity the ideas of all those blessings which civilization and the arts bestow upon human kind. Let a few Quakers, for example, of the proper description-husbandmen, blacksmiths, carpenters, comprehending the more necessary kind of artificers, have a portion of land allotted them among the Hindoos for their subsistence; where they would form a little village, in which the arts and the arrangements of European society would be visible to the eyes of the natives : let them observe the prosperity and happiness which attend these arts and arrangements, compared with the wretchedness which attends, and ever must attend, their own: let these societies be spread as numerously as possible, in the more populous parts of the country: let these villages be open to all such natives as may choose to join them, and to labour and live after the manner of the Europeans: let them serve, above all, as places of asylum, to which all those may repair that lose caste, or are treated with contumely by their countrymen, for having embraced Christianity; and where they may find employment, and all the natural and precious rewards of industry and good conduct. Let all this be done, and, notwithstanding the difficulty presented by the castes, and the difference of character and condition between the savage Americans and half-civilized Hindoos, the happiest effects, we think, might be anticipated.

CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.*

WE should be greatly mortified in reading this speech, and thinking of the fate of the Bill which it recommended, but that we recollect we are advanced no further than the

nineteenth century of the Christian era. At so early a period, however, of knowledge, and so soon after the very

* Cruelty to Animals. The Speech of Lord Erskine, in the House of Peers, on the Bill for preventing Cruelty to Animals. 1809.

CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

67

first step in the progress from barbarism to civilization, it was too much to expect that a nation should enact effectual laws, to deprive itself of any part of the license and the exhibitions of cruelty, which are always so much to the taste of barbarians. Some famous legislators have been censured for trying to force and anticipate the improvements of society within their states, by superinducing premature refinements on a substantially gross state of the moral and intellectual cultivation of the community. And what could be the use of recording and condemning such an error, but to instruct other legislators to avoid it? The instruction has not been lost; for though it might be, no doubt, from a sort of amiable candour, that Lord Erskine fancied it compatible with the present degree of civilization in this pretendedly enlightened and Christian country, to put a strong interdict on the detestable barbarities which he describes or alludes to, he was taught his mistake by an authority and a decision to which all will reverently bow. Still we think it was proper for the speech to be printed. though it could only serve (instead of the same quantity of larmoyante poetry) to gratify the sentimental part of the nation, and to show the discontented part, who are always complaining of the interference of power in everything, what very signal privileges are yet left untouched by any such interference.

It begins by adverting to the notorious fact, "that it is not only useless but dangerous to poor suffering animals, to reprove their oppressors, or to threaten them with punishment. The general answer, with the addition of bitter oaths and increased cruelty, is, what is that to you? If the offender be a servant, he curses you, and asks if you are his master; and if he be the master himself, he tells you that the animal is his own." "The validity," says his Lordship, "of this most infamous and stupid defence, arises from that defect in the law which I seek to remedy. Animals are considered as property only. To destroy or abuse them from malice to the proprietor, or with an intention injurious to his interest in them, is criminal, but the animals themselves are without protection -the law regards them not substantively-they have no RIGHTS." He proceeds to argue with great force and beauty

of sentiment, that they ought to be recognised by the law as having rights purely their own, as beings capable of pleasure and pain, and that the dominion of man over them is a moral trust, in a different sense from that in which his inanimate property may be so called. At the same time he insists (an argument quite necessary to be kept in view at the beginning, middle, and end, of any pleading to human creatures in behalf of mercy) that the execution of this trust which shall be most benevolent towards the animals, will be, on the whole, most beneficial to the interests, in the gross sense, of the proprietors. In due subordination to this grand argument to a depraved being, it may be urged, and it is strongly urged by his Lordship, that the solemn promulgation by government of the principle of our duty towards the animal race, and the putting in force correspondent specific laws, would greatly contribute to the improvement of the moral sense of mankind. In framing the bill, he proposed to recognise the principle, in the following preamble: "Whereas it has pleased Almighty God to subdue to the dominion, use, and comfort, of man, the strength and faculties of many useful animals, and to provide others for his food; and whereas the abuse of that dominion by cruel and oppressive treatment of such animals, is not only highly unjust and immoral, but most pernicious in its example, having an evident tendency to harden the heart against the natural feelings of humanity." He censures the bill some years since proposed in the Commons against bull-baiting, as essentially defective in not referring to the justice due from man to the inferior animals, but resting itself on mere political considerations, such as the injury done to masters by drawing servants from their work. After exhibiting a striking view of that great and mysterious economy which has rendered death necessary throughout the whole animal world, his Lordship makes the most ample allowance for destruction, not accompanied by wanton cruelty, that could be desired by the most carnivorous or sporting part of his audience. He makes most ample allowance, too, in applying his principle to the state of beasts of labour, for the ordinary, and occasionally extreme, necessities of man, and acknowledges the impossibility of framing such a law as should protect them in all

ON PROPAGATING CHRISTIANITY IN ASIA.

69

cases from severity. But while he trusts that much good would be done by the operation on the thoughts and feelings of men of the legal and solemn declaration of the moral principle, he maintains there are many flagrant abuses that might be distinctly subjected to the operation of penal law.

ON THE PROPAGATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN ASIA.*

THIS work has not much of a controversial complexion, having been written previously to the now nearly subsided contest between the friends of Christianity and the advocates of heathenism. These, we think, are not illiberal terms of description, in adverting to that controversy. Nor are they terms unlikely to be employed by the future ecclesiastical historian of these times, provided he happen to find, and have patience to read, a few of the productions; without which he could form no adequate conception either of the depravity or the imbecility displayed on the occasion. There might have been a mode of opposing the Christian designs on India, which should have been very decidedly irreligious, quite sufficiently so to satisfy any reasonably moderate hater of Christianity, and yet should clearly have stopped short of entitling those who employed it to the denomination of advocates of heathenism. Pretending a firm belief in the religion of the Bible, and a profound veneration for it (as indeed has been done by some of the persons alluded to), they might have avowed the utmost abhorrence of paganism, protesting that they thought it a most melancholy thing to see millions of the human race ignorant of the true God, and a hideous thing to see them prostrating themselves before idols, and practising, as a religion, many ridiculous and cruel and abominable rites; and that therefore they entertained, and should ever entertain, an earnest wish that this horrid mass of combined delusion and depravity could be immediately annihilated. And then, after duly avowing these proper

A Dissertation on the Propagation of Christianity in Asia. By the Rev. Hugh Pearson, M.A., of St. John's College, Oxford. 4to. 1808.

sentiments, they might have proceeded to say, that, notwithstanding such a view of heathenism, they must take leave to think that it is no business of ours to attempt the rescue of any of our foreign subjects from such a condition; that in the East we ought to keep strictly to our vocation of conquest and commerce; that any attempt to introduce the true religion, though by persuasion alone, might possibly irritate the pagans, and render them less submissive subjects; and that religious considerations are, systematically, to be sacrificed to political ones. Now this we should call irreligion. We should hold it a virtual renunciation of Christianity to maintain, that any interest can be involved in our connexion with foreign subjects, for the sake of which it can be lawful to repel from them the proselyting approaches of that religion; and a virtual renunciation of faith in a Supreme Governor to believe, that a sincere and peaceful endeavour to promote his cause can ever, while his superintendence continues in the creation, be found contrary to sound policy. But the persons who obtained a momentary notoriety in the late controversy, were not content with any such irreligion as this. It should be distinctly recorded, as it may possibly be a fact worth knowing long after their pamphlets and names have perished, that they have not only represented that the effort to supplant paganism by peaceful Christian instruction may be politically mischievous, and insisted that to political considerations all others are without hesitation to be sacrificed, but shown an explicit partiality to the paganism itself. In speaking of its fables, institutions, and ministers, they have carefully employed a language not only of forbearance of "abuse," as they call it, but of marked veneration; and they have been violently angry, that the friends of Christianity should assume the truth of that religion in terms implying that all other religions are therefore necessarily false. They have been quite furious when the zealous Christians in the East have applied, and have been justified by their friends at home in applying, to superstitious notions and idolatrous rites, the identical language applied to them in the Bible, or language of identical import. Every expression of hatred to the whole, or the particular parts, of the Indian pantheon and its rituals,―a kind of expression in which the Christians had imagined they might