Rage,
That prompts the traveller on from stage to stage.
Still on his strength depends their boasted speed;
For them his limbs grow weak, his bare ribs bleed;
And though he groaning quickens at command,
Their extra shilling in the rider's hand
Becomes his bitter scourge . . . .
The description, too long to quote, which follows of the
tortures inflicted on the post-horse a century ago, is almost
incredible to us, and we flatter ourselves that such things
would not be tolerated now. But we must get over the ground
somehow, and I take it that but for the invention of other
more rapid means of transit the present generation would be as
little concerned at the pains of the post-horse as they are at
the horrors enacted behind the closed doors of the
physiological laboratories, the atrocity of the steel trap,
the continual murdering by our big game hunters of all the
noblest animals left on the globe, and finally the annual
massacre of millions of beautiful birds in their breeding time
to provide ornaments for the hats of our women.
"Come forth he must," says Bloomfield, when he describes how
the flogged horse at length gains the end of the stage and,
"trembling under complicated pains," when "every nerve a
separate anguish knows," he is finally unharnessed and led to
the stable door, but has scarcely tasted food and rest before
he is called for again.
Though limping, maimed and sore;
He hears the whip; the chaise is at the door . . .
The collar tightens and again he feels
His half-healed wounds inflamed; again the wheels
With tiresome sameness in his ears resound
O'er blinding dust or miles of flinty ground.
This is over and done with simply because the post-horse is no
longer wanted, and we have to remember that no form of cruelty
inflicted, whether for sport or profit or from some other
motive, on the lower animals has ever died out of itself in
the land. Its end has invariably been brought about by
legislation through the devotion of men who were the "cranks,"
the "faddists," the "sentimentalists," of their day, who were
jeered and laughed at by their fellows, and who only succeeded
by sheer tenacity and force of character after long fighting
against public opinion and a reluctant Parliament, in finally
getting their law.
Bloomfield's was but a small voice crying in the wilderness,
and he was indeed a small singer in the day of our greatest
singers. As a poet he was not worthy to unloose the buckles
of their shoes; but he had one thing in common with the best
and greatest, the feeling of tender love and compassion for
the lower animals which was in Thomson and Cowper, but found
its highest expression in his own great contemporaries,
Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth.
