WCP3287

[1]¹

2 Minto Street

Edinburgh

23^rd. Jan[uary] 1910

Dear Sir

I have read with very great interest your charming book "The World of Light".

The problem of human and animal suffering has concerned me for forty years & I am relieved to be assured that sensation in the "Brutes" is not so acute as in man. But the constant cruelty to domestic animals as horses, oxen & camels [2] which I have seen in every quarter of the globe the evidence that they do suffer & have no pleasure in their lives evinced by emancipation depression & working even to death, the painful diseases & deathbeds which my calling brings under my notice, the facts that the most distressing complaints attack good & bad alike & may be due to ignorance [3] which is not the fault of the sufferer also that this suffering has no beneficial effect on the individual or the [1 word illeg.] makes it hard to believe that it has been foreordained medicine only alleviate symptoms, we have no specific for any disease. The only drug which subdues ^severe pain is opium and its use has very great drawbacks —

To my mind whatever the ultimate goal of the race — all knowledge or even eternal life does not justify the miseries endured [4] even in historic times & the conclusion seems inevitable that the directive mind is either not all-powerful or not all-good —

A case of a lady who for eight months has suffered agony from cancer of the spine & in whom morphia produces distressing sickness makes one wonder what it means[.]

Excuse me for bothering you | Yours truly | W. Booth [signature]²