THE peculiar service which the dog has rendered to man consists in keeping intact, in its purity, the spirit of loyalty. It would be difficult to find anywhere else in the animal kingdom an idea of loyalty which is not tinctured by some selfish motive. It has alone remained for the dog to present man with this idea, and it is because of this idea that our standard of loyalty has never wholly degenerated.
To raise the standard of any action requires that behind it there shall be an idea; but when we come to search for an idea of pure loyalty among mankind alone, there is always some blur on the picture. Either the man has a selfish reason for being loyal, or he is impelled to it by some motive outside of himself.
There are so many cases, however, where the dog has been loyal without the slightest shadow of reason, that we have a permanent contribution to our sentiment on the part of this animal—almost a greater gift than any other human being has been able to bestow on mankind. So long as the dog, following his erring master, is ever ready to lay down his life for him—so long as this is an eternal object lesson for us and stands ever ready to shame us, we never can be as wholly self-centered as we would be under other circumstances. In this respect the dog is infinitely our superior.
When we have stripped the world, as we come to know it through our experience, from all of its superficialities—- that is to say, from the network of impressions which go to make up the sum total of it, we come down, after all, to a few fundamental feelings. One of these feelings happens to be the one which is expressed through the kindly eyes of our dog, as, wagging his tail, he looks into our eyes. There is something there that is fundamental, and which somehow we may not fully explain. It always makes us more or less ashamed of ourselves. This is why the vivisectionist may bolster up his argument with all the tangle of scientific data and fabrication that he can mass together in its defense, and it shall avail him nothing.
It still remains true that our dog, an animal scientifically declared to be lower in the scale than we are, has furnished us with a permanent ideal, the superiority of which we are bound to acknowledge every time we feel our hearts respond to the friendly wagging of his tail. If, during these moments, we did not feel that the vivisectionist was a blundering hypocrite, we should not then be even worthy of the companionship of the dog.
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SO often we call a man a dog when we wish to reproach him.
And yet, a dog:
Doesn't lie,
Doesn't swear,
Doesn't cheat,
Doesn't drink,
Doesn't smoke,
Doesn't swindle,
Doesn't flirt,
Doesn't borrow,
Doesn't pretend,
And wouldn't even resent it if you called it a man.
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