I can scarcely conceive the possibility of so defining morality, morals or the moral sense, moral responsibility, and religious feeling as to exclude the lower animals from participation in the possession of these qualities. The probability at least is that any ingenious definition that could be so framed as to exclude these animals would also exclude whole races and ranks of mankind. Philosophers are constantly guilty of the folly of basing their psychological definitions on faculties, feelings, or phenomena that occur in the most highly cultured individuals of the most highly civilised human races. Their moral sense is that of the moral philosopher, their religious feeling that of the Christian theologian."

However man may view the subject, certain of the lower animals themselves have an obvious sense of personal merit or demerit, and they show this feeling in a great variety of very practical ways. The dog shows its consciousness of having performed some praiseworthy act by looking for approbation and reward, or of evil-doing by confessing its guilt and preparing either for punishment or its evasion. It is proud of a noble action and ashamed of a mean one. It exhibits equally its satisfaction at successful defence or the salvation of life or property, and its shame at theft, especially if caught in flagrante delicto. It submits to punishment that it feels it has deserved, but protests against suffering for a crime it has not committed. The feeling that it deserves praise, credit, or reward leads also to self-applause or selfapprobation in the dog (Watson). As is elsewhere shown, the dog, horse, mule, elephant, and other animals attach a value to their work. They form an estimate, and a generally correct one, of their deserts or rights, upon which they sometimes insist if they are not duly recognised by man.

All evidence goes to show that moral merit and demerit must, along with virtue and vice in general, be conceded to the lower animals in common with man. It is not easy, no

doubt, to determine what precise amount or degree of the said merit or the reverse they deserve in connection with given actions; but the very same kind of difficulty occurs incessantly in regard to man himself.

CHAPTER IV.

MORAL RESPONSIBILITY.

It has been shown in other chapters that certain animals1. Possess a sense of right and wrong—

2. With a power of choice between them.

3. Commit crimes, and are aware of the criminality of their acts.

4. Have a wonderful power of self-control.

5. Possess not only a moral but a religious sense, including a conscience.

duct.

6. Have a knowledge and dread of consequences.

7. Can deliberate and decide on proposed courses of con

8. Have freedom of will, the faculty of voluntary action. 9. Balance or weigh present or immediate pleasures against prospective pains.

10. Appreciate rewards and punishments.

11. Perceive and correct their own mistakes, as well frequently as those of man.

12. Have a knowledge of duty or trust.

Such moral and mental qualities seem to me necessarily to imply or involve moral responsibility. Various writers experience no difficulty in conceding such a psychical quality to certain of the lower animals.

Practically man in a variety of ways recognises animal responsibility. He does so, for instance, in all forms of training or education which are based on the application of the principle of rewards and punishments, and on certain of the moral or mental qualities immediately above enumerated. It is recognised more conspicuously and directly in the judgment of

animal crime by human tribunals. The accountability of other animals for their acts, when these acts injuriously affected man, was the basis of numerous trials by the earliest human lawgivers, who judged and punished animals for crimes or misdemeanours just as they did man himself. Human laws, ancient and modern, practically acknowledge animal responsibility in animal crime. Thus the old Jewish law, as given in Exodus (xxi. 28-32), punishes an ox by stoning to death that fatally gores a man or a woman, and not the master to whom it belongs, unless the animal was by habit and repute vicious and he took no means to prevent accident to man from its viciousness. 'A horse whose master had taught him many tricks was tried at Lisbon in 1601, found guilty of being possessed by the Devil, and was burnt' (Draper). In more modern times the shepherd's dog has repeatedly been condemned to death and executed in Scotland for sheep-stealing (Low).

Animal responsibility was apparently recognised also in the baptism of animals in the thirteenth century (Pierquin), as it has been in admitting them as witnesses at law in human courts of justice. Dogs have appeared as witnesses. in murder cases not only in the Middle Ages (Pierquin), but so recently as 1872 in Dundee; and their evidence has not unfrequently been accepted as conclusive-for instance, in the detection and recognition of murderers.

Moral responsibility seems, moreover, to be involved in at least many of the practical jokes practised, either on each other or on man, by the lower animals. In the cases referred to, as is more fully pointed out in the chapter on 'Practical Jokes,' there is deliberate malice or intentional mischief, self-amusement at the expense of another or the gratification of revenge or other passions, a perfect knowledge of results, a cruel glorying in the sufferings of fellows. When a parrot deliberately, for its own delectation, sets a cat and a dog by the ears, or causes a whole party of travellers to stop a railway train and get out to look for a child that was supposed to have fallen under the wheels, or makes a servant maid or waiter attend to a fancied summons from a master or lodger, the animal must be held as,

in a sense, morally responsible for its misdeeds and properly punishable therefor; and the best proof of the propriety of this view is the fact that punishment prevents the repetition of the offence, where it is deemed an offence and where the punishment is judicious and proportionate. In other words, the animal can control its propensity to self-enjoyment at the expense of others, can refrain from doing that which is forbidden, that which brings punishment; and it does so refrain, does so control itself under adequate motive-the dread of further punishment.

But the responsibility which in many cases is attached to the dog or other animals, in at least the majority, really pertains to man, to the owner of the animal, who has usually been also its trainer. Many animals commit crimes, and what they know to be crimes-voluntarily, at their own instance-without instruction from man; for instance, murder either of their fellows or of man himself. But, unhappily, these instances are rare compared with those other cases in which the animals have received a systematic criminal education from man, whereby they have been trained to become either his accomplices or his substitutes or instruments in crime, or all three, as occasion might require. Sir Walter Scott, the Ettrick Shepherd, Professor Low, and other authors give us the history of various sheep-stealing dogs, some of which suffered-for or with their masters— the extreme penalty of human law. In such cases the human judges made no allowance apparently for the fact that the poor animals, so convicted and condemned, were morally vicious just because and in proportion as their masters had made them so; for which reason it would have been only just had all the responsibility been attached. to, and all the punishment fallen on, their human instructors -to or on those, moreover, who alone had reaped the benefit of the nefarious traffic in which man and dog had been alike engaged. The character' and misdeeds of dogs. still form a frequent subject of enquiry in all our law courts, but nowadays very properly in reference to their masters' not their own-responsibility.

By the non-prevention of the development of vicious or

dangerous habits, or the non-correction of such habits when developed; by neglect of proper education or by vicious training; by the direct encouragement or non-repression of such propensities as biting or worrying-the master renders himself—and very properly-liable by most laws for the damage done by his dog or horse. By modern British as well as by ancient Roman and Greek law man is held responsible for the doings of the domestic or other animals which he possesses (Pierquin). Thus he is answerable for the acts of eccentric, dangerous, vicious, ill-tempered, insane, or rabid animals of which he is the owner; so that the mere ownership of such animals as the dog, horse, elephant, cat, or monkey is in itself attended by a considerable measure of-it may be troublesome and expensive-responsibility.

It may be regarded as some sort of justification for including or associating the punishment of the animals in or with that of their masters that, had the thievish collies, for instance, been spared, there might have arisen a difficulty or impossibility in eradicating their vicious habits, the presumption being that the unfortunate dogs would never have forsaken their evil courses while health and strength were left. And such a presumption is strengthened by what we know of the force of habit or discipline in the lower animals, as in man, whether for evil or good. An amusing story has been told by William Howitt and other writers of a highwayman's horse which knew and played its part well while it remained a highwayman's horse, but which, when sold to an honest man, showed the influence of its former bad habits, the result entirely of man's training, by leading him nolens volens into the most awkward predicaments. But, on the other hand, it is impossible to say what might have been achieved by systematic kindly efforts at reformation in the case of dogs and horses trained for their special purposes by sheep-stealers and other classes of thieves, robbers, brigands, or smugglers. The chances of reformation and the advantages of reformatories are quite as great or as small in the case of animal as of human criminals.

We know that in man criminals have certain mental characteristics, certain moral defects (Bruce Thomson). They