In short, man, when he acts ideally, treats these beings at all times as associates, not as slaves or machines, as his best friends and most faithful… - J. Howard Moore

In The Universal Kinship, Howard Moore left to humanitarians a treasure which it will be their own fault if they do not value as it deserves. There is a tendency to forget that it is to modern evolutionary science that the ethic of humaneness owes its strongest corroboration. The physical basis of the humane philosophy rests on the biological fact that kinship is universal. Starting from this admitted truth, Moore showed, with much wealth of argument and epigram, that the supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human has no more existence, apart from the imagination of man. than the physical gulf which has now been bridged by science. The purpose of our movement was admirably stated by him: "to put science and humanitarianism in place of tradition and savagery." It was with that aim in view that our League of Humaneness had been formed.

Sympathy, consciousness of kind, means simply the realization or the conscious recognition by living beings of the kinship of content. A human being unconscious of kind, an unsympathetic and inhuman person, is one who is likely to assume that his conscious states are sui generis, that they are more precious and intense than, and intrinsically different from, those of others—one who realizes that an injured sensory is a savage thing in his own organism, but who does not suppose it to be anything of the kind when it hangs to the brain of a Hottentot or a horse. Why do the human rich treat the human poor with such inconsideration? Why do they allow or compel them to remain disinherited and crushed while they themselves loll in superfluous wealth? Because there is Inadequate consciousness of kind.

Man has been so long accustomed to the undisputed privilege of spoliation, and has so long and so brilliantly imagined himself to be all there is in the world, that a proposition denying this privilege, however fair the proposition may be from an impartial point of view, is promptly classified as the allegation of a zany, and is supposed to be conclusively disposed of when it is shown to be capable of interfering with human convenience or pleasure.