Daily Inspiration Quote by Elihu Root

Root is taking the temperature of a society that has started to treat empathy as a civic benchmark rather than a private virtue. The line works because it’s both congratulatory and prosecutorial: it flatters “now” as morally advanced while quietly indicting the complacency that let cruelty pass as background noise “a century ago.” That time stamp does real rhetorical labor. It frames moral progress as measurable, almost bureaucratic, the way a lawyer-turned-statesman would prefer it: standards evolve; what was once admissible evidence becomes inadmissible.

The pairing of “men” with “the lower animals” is the quote’s pressure point. Root isn’t just advocating kindness to animals; he’s describing an expanding circle of moral concern and using animals as the clearest proof that sensibility has sharpened. It’s a strategic move: fewer people will defend animal cruelty outright, so the listener is nudged toward the bigger claim that cruelty in general has become socially legible, punishable, shameful.

Subtextually, Root is also defining “sensibilities” as an instrument of governance. When cruelty “shocks,” it stops being a personal failing and becomes a public problem - “wicked and degrading” not only to the victim but to the perpetrator and, by extension, the nation that tolerates it. In Root’s era - progressive reform, muckraking exposure, early animal welfare laws, labor agitation - this is the language of modernization: a society proving it’s fit for power by showing it can feel, judge, and regulate what it once ignored.