Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 March 1918 — ONLY HUMAN BEINGS CRUEL [ARTICLE]

ONLY HUMAN BEINGS CRUEL

Proud Man the Bole Living Creator* Capable of Deliberately Inflicting Suffering on Others. A cruel person is one who exults in the pain, mental or bodily, suffered by another. Cruelty has its basis in anger (and thus is related to the combative instinct), though there is a cold-blood-ed form of cruelty which may be enjoyed without any obtrusive feeling of anger, Henry Campbell writes in the Lancet, London. Cruelty, implying as It does selfconsciousness—the ability to realize the feelings of others —is essentially a human attribute. Children who impale frogs and eviscerate flies cannot be said to be cruel, for they know not what they do. Nor arte the lower animals cruel, seeing that they are wholly unconscious of the sufferings of others. Thus the charge of cruelty against the carnivora is unjust. These animals generally destroy their victims outright and In the rare cases (e. g., cat and mouse) where they prolong the suffering they have no knowledge of the pain they are causing. When, therefore, we stigmatize the conduct of the cruel man as "brutal” we wrong the brutes. ~ -'LL L I £ < The animal which attacks another, and in so doing causes pain, merely responds to a blind, unthinking instinct ; but man, proud man*, who looks before and after. Is able to realize and take pleasure in the pain he deliberately, and by subtle means maybe, seta out to cause. It is clearly absurd to speak of his conduct as “brutaL” Rather should we call it devilish, the devil usually being credited with a goodly share of intelligence. We must cease to libel the brutes by designating the basest acts of man as brutaL As a matter of fact, they cannot be charged with nonmoral conduct, seeing that they are devoid of self-con-sciousness.