"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.
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