people overfeed pet dogs with the money that might feed and
clothe them.

It is exceedingly difficult to make people realize that an evil
is an evil. For instance, we seize a man and deliberately do him
a malicious injury: say, imprison him for years. One would not
suppose that it needed any exceptional clearness of wit to
recognize in this an act of diabolical cruelty. But in England
such a recognition provokes a stare of surprise, followed by an
explanation that the outrage is punishment or justice or
something else that is all right, or perhaps by a heated attempt
to argue that we should all be robbed and murdered in our beds if
such senseless villainies as sentences of imprisonment were not
committed daily. It is useless to argue that even if this were
true, which it is not, the alternative to adding crimes of our
own to the crimes from which we suffer is not helpless
submission. Chickenpox is an evil; but if I were to declare that
we must either submit to it or else repress it sternly by seizing
everyone who suffers from it and punishing them by inoculation
with smallpox, I should be laughed at; for though nobody could
deny that the result would be to prevent chickenpox to some
extent by making people avoid it much more carefully, and to
effect a further apparent prevention by making them conceal it
very anxiously, yet people would have sense enough to see that
the deliberate propagation of smallpox was a creation of evil,
and must therefore be ruled out in favor of purely humane and
hygienic measures. Yet in the precisely parallel case of a man
breaking into my house and stealing my wife's diamonds I am
expected as a matter of course to steal ten years of his life,
torturing him all the time. If he tries to defeat that monstrous