
New York City Enormities - The Broken Leg on Broadway.
We flatter ourselves that, as a people, we are fond of horses. We are also fond of saying that we are a humane people. Are we? Let us lookt a little into the matter, and see whether each of us, disavowing to himself any part in the great inhumanity of the day, does not judge of public sentiment by his own generous impulses. "I love the noble creatures," says one of this class; "I would rather suffer myself, than treat them with cruelty. No reprobation can be too strong for those who daily torture some of them to death, and every man I know feels exactly as I do." It is hard to press a charge against a whole population in the face of individual disclaimers such as these, and perhaps, in charity, it should be modified into one of carelessness, or indifference to the horrible brutality Broadway daily witnesses, leaving it to each one to decide for himself, how much less culpable than the crime itself is the indifference to it in others.
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, December 9, 1865.


