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104
ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES
dogs of opportunities for exercising their natural skill as hunters, he may be responsible for bringing into existence a new and terrifying breed of mice which will proceed to eat the dogs.
Ideals may be desirable mental furniture or they may be merely so much useless and inartistic bric-a-brac. Too often they fall into the latter class. If Arjun Lalshet, instead of trying to breed a race of vegetarian dogs, set about larnin 'fleas, wasps and mosquitoes to become uncompromising vegetarians, those of us who during the summer were almost butchered to make a mosquitoes' holiday might agree that there was some sense in his eccentricity ; but I suppose an idealist like this gentle Hindu would resent such a suggestion as being altogether too practical."
The Man in the Street.
Το
The Editor of the
Dear Sir,
My attention has been drawn by an English friend of mine to an article which appeared in the Daily * * * in the beginning of the second week of this month -- probably the 9th instant--and which sought to cast ridicule on the work of a Jaina millionaire who is said to have set apart a village of his estate for the benefit of animals including dogs. The gentleman in question is not known to me ; and the name as given in the Daily *** is an unlikely one. Probably the real name of the Indian millionaire is Arjun Lal Seth (or Sethi) and not Arjun Lalshet. I am quite prepared to recognize the editorial right to make comments of all kinds in a journal, but I am inclined to take the view that you were not quite correctly informed of the real facts, and that much of what was written was really written under a great deal of misapprehension.
I should have thought that there was nothing ridiculous in a Jaina philanthropist's founding a place of rest for animals. The other day I read in one of the English dailies that a certain English lady had made arrangements for the founding of a sanatorium, Spa and hospital for animals. It would appear that a place known as St. Swithin's
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