As to the historic fact, I have no doubt that Mr. C. J. Thatcher is in the right. In 1863, or thereabout, some Victoria sportsmen, sighing like Alexander for more worlds to conquer, bethought them that the coursing of hares and rabbits was a luxury no civilized country ought to be without. So they applied to the Acclimatization Society; and the Society, thinking it rather a bright idea, wrote to its traveling agent in Great Britain, Mr. Manning Thatcher, who soon got together a sufficient herd of rabbits and started for Australia in the wailing-ship Relief. Ship life seems to have disagreed with the rabbits; when Mr. Thatcher reached Australia, not a single one of his rabbits was alive. But he, indomitable man, went straight back to England to get some more rabbits. His next attempt was again unsuccessful; and the next. Three times he started for Australia with a cargo of rabbits; three times he failed to bring a rabbit alive to port. Three times the gods strove to save Australia; but against determination like Mr. Thatcher’s the very gods do battle in vain. On his third journey he had kept a close watch on his charges and found out the cause of their extraordinary death rate; he provided a remedy, and his fourth voyage was entirely successful. It was as if the gods had given up the struggle in disgust; Mr. Thatcher landed without the loss of a rabbit.

对于这一段话，我一点头绪都没有……
大家有时间就帮忙翻译一下~
没有时间，能summary一下最好
呵呵~~ 给我点提示吧~~
谢谢大家了！

我大概讲一下这段话的意思吧

在大约1863年左右,一些Victoria的运动家感慨这个世界应该有更多运动等待他们去征服,
于是他们想到一个运动,就是捕猎野兔和家兔,他们认为这是一个高度文明国家必不可少的奢侈运动,于是他们向驯养协会提出申请.协会认为这是一个好主意,就写信给在大不列颠的送货员-撒切尔,于是撒切尔就聚集了一大堆兔子,启程坐船去澳大利亚,结果当他抵达澳大利亚后,没有一只兔子是活着的.但他没有被困难吓倒,他又回到英格兰(即那时的大不列颠),又带来了更多的兔子去澳大利亚,结果还是失败了.后来又进行了第三次尝试,还是以失败告终.第三次虽然失败了,但他找到了兔子死亡的症结,在第四次送货过程中,他实行了有效的措施,结果兔子顺利到达澳大利亚,一只都没死亡



大概意思就是这样了,还有哪些细节地方不懂,可以跟帖问我

That makes a lot of sense!!!
Thank you so much!!!

终于看懂了~~
再次感谢！

后半部分其实都看懂了，就是前半部分~~
原来可真是一头雾水~~
还想在感谢一次！
：-）

On Rabbits, Morality, Etc.
                                                   Walter Murdoch

I hope the compositor will be especially careful over the title of this essay, and that the linotype will play no unseemly tricks. To guard against any accident, I must ask you to take notice that the word ‘rabbits’ is, or ought to be, followed by a comma, not an apostrophe. It would be most distressing if any innocent person were cheated into reading the article in the hope of learning something about rabbits’ morality—a subject on which my ignorance is profound….When you come to think of it, it would not be a bad subject. The rabbit might be taken as a fine example of what we call race patriotism. His supreme ethical motive is the expansion of the race. He dreams of the day when the rabbit family shall inherit the earth from pole to pole. If we could imagine a rabbit singing, we may suppose his song would be something like ‘Rule, Britannia’, or ‘Deutschland uber Alles’. He is careless of the single life; the individual is nothing to him, the race is all. ‘Do what you will with me,’ he says; ‘trap me, poison me, skin me, pack me tight in tins, make my fur into a hat and my carcass into a pie—what does it matter so long as my race endures and spreads and burrows its way across kingdoms until all the earth is one huge rabbit-warren?’ He is the perfect Imperialist—that, however, is not my subject today; nor any other day. It deserves to be treated, not in my halting prose, but in Homeric verse. It is a matter for an epic. Mine is a humbler theme.

   A little while ago you may have noticed on the cable page of your morning paper the following item: ‘The death is reported from London of Mr. John R. Collison of Maidstone, Kent, who claimed to be the first person to introduce rabbits into Australia. He was 85 years of age.’ A few days later the cables informed us that Mr. Collison’s claim to this distinction was disputed. ‘Mr. C. J. Thatcher contends that his father was responsible for having introduced rabbits into Australia.’

   Now, to begin with, this conflict of claims is surely a somewhat curious and diverting spectacle. The idea of two men each ‘claiming’ to have been the first to introduce a deadly pest into a country hitherto free from it, has the charm of novelty. Mr. C. J. Thatcher, ready to die in the last ditch defending his father’s claim to have done more harm to Australia than anybody else, presents a singular example of filial devotion. It is as if a man went about boasting that one of his ancestors had the honor of bringing malaria into Europe. It is as if a man gave himself airs because his Uncle Henry, and nobody else, had started the recent bush-fires in Victoria. It is as if a statesman were to write a large book to prove that he, and he alone, had had the honor of starting the Great War.

上面是全文……
现在基本上大义都弄懂了……
不过，我没弄懂作者是如何将那些兔子的东西和morality联系起来的……
觉得文章怪怪的……
作者讲那些关于兔子的东西应该是为了引出morality，可是我就是看不明白~~
又要请教了~
：-）

如果要summary全文的话……
好像前面那些讲兔子的东西基本上都可以省略……

全文没有show完全……
   As to the historic fact, I have no doubt that Mr. C. J. Thatcher is in the right. In 1863, or thereabout, some Victoria sportsmen, sighing like Alexander for more worlds to conquer, bethought them that the coursing of hares and rabbits was a luxury no civilized country ought to be without. So they applied to the Acclimatization Society; and the Society, thinking it rather a bright idea, wrote to its traveling agent in Great Britain, Mr. Manning Thatcher, who soon got together a sufficient herd of rabbits and started for Australia in the wailing-ship Relief. Ship life seems to have disagreed with the rabbits; when Mr. Thatcher reached Australia, not a single one of his rabbits was alive. But he, indomitable man, went straight back to England to get some more rabbits. His next attempt was again unsuccessful; and the next. Three times he started for Australia with a cargo of rabbits; three times he failed to bring a rabbit alive to port. Three times the gods strove to save Australia; but against determination like Mr. Thatcher’s the very gods do battle in vain. On his third journey he had kept a close watch on his charges and found out the cause of their extraordinary death rate; he provided a remedy, and his fourth voyage was entirely successful. It was as if the gods had given up the struggle in disgust; Mr. Thatcher landed without the loss of a rabbit.

   Meanwhile, owing to the long delay, the aforesaid sportsmen seem to have lost interest. Mr. Thatcher found that nobody wanted his rabbits. With a companion, he went about the country offering baskets of live rabbits for sale, but he did not sell enough to pay expenses. His stock of rabbits increased faster than he could sell them. One hot summer afternoon the two men decided that they had had enough of the tedious and unprofitable business; so they took all their rabbits out into the bush—and opened the baskets.

   I happen to have in my possession an old newspaper containing a portrait of Mr. Thatcher—and a thoroughly benevolent old gentleman he looks—also a picture of the medal presented by the Acclimatization Society to Mr. Thatcher in recognition of his splendid achievement in the matter of rabbits. I presume Mr. C. J. Thatcher possesses the original medal; probably it hangs in a conspicuous place in his drawing room. It is a perfect example of the irony of history.

Why have I kept that old newspaper? Well, primarily, I suppose, because I am interested in ethics, as we all are whether we know it or not. Every one of us, every day, is passing moral judgments, though not in the technical terms of the moralist. We do not, in our daily conversation, talk much about virtue, or the summum bonum, or the moral sense, or the categorical imperative, or the hedonistic calculus, or our ethical ideals; at least, we do talk about them continually, but not under those names. We don’t say of a man that he is a highly virtuous character; we say he’s a pretty decent sort of chap. We don’t say that certain conduct is ethically indefensible; we say it’s a bit over the fence. We mean just the same. We are passing moral judgments.

   And our underlying assumption is that it is quite easy to tell a good action from a bad one, right conduct from wrong conduct. And this common assumption is favoured by popular preachers and writers who tell us that we ought not to split straws about a plain question, and that it is a simple thing to obey conscience, that divinely-given faculty which tells us, infallibly, what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. They speak as if this conscience were a kind of moral sense of smell, by which we can tell a good action from a bad one just as certainly as we can, in the dark, tell a violet from a polecat. I want to ask those who hold such a comfortable doctrine a question, which puzzles me. Mr. Thatcher’s action, in introducing the rabbit into Australia, a good action or a bad one?

Mere common sense will not give us the answer. It would be hard to persuade common sense that an action which ruined thousands of innocent people and made desolate vast tracts of country, which struck a terrific blow at the agricultural and pastoral industries of a continent, can be described as a good action. Neither will common sense blame Mr. Thatcher for obeying orders. He is unquestionably to be praised for his zeal, his enthusiasm, his unconquerable persistence in what he thought to be an admirable project. We have only to look at his portrait to see that he was a man of high character, a man actuated by the best intentions. If intentions, as common sense tells us, are what really distinguish right conduct from wrong, Mr. Thatcher beyond doubt acted rightly. What then?—will common sense admit that a man may act rightly in doing a bad action? It sounds like a paradox. it is certainly a puzzle; and if you never, in the course of your practical life, feel that you are puzzled by it, that can only be because you never think.

   We make a mistake, of course, when we think of ‘an action’ as if it were a simple separate whole. Merely to open a basket, as Mr. Thatcher did, is a thing neither right nor wrong in itself; all depends on what is inside the basket—depends, that is, on the consequence of the basket’s being opened. The immediate consequence, in this instance, was that the rabbits jumped out, happy in their freedom; so far, the act had added to the sum of happiness in the sentient world; so far, it was a good action. Ten years later, it began to be of a darker colour, for its consequences had begun to develop.

   Surely there never was a more fallacious saying than Tennyson’s:
        And, because right is right, to follow right
        Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.

   Half the disasters endured by the long-suffering human race have been produced by good men who acted in the scorn of consequence. To do a thing without considering what the result of your action will be is mere imbecility. The truth is with that other poet who tells us that


…Of waves
Our life is, and our deeds are pregnant graves
Blown rolling from the sunset to the dawn.

   An action must be considered with its consequences; with the sum-total of its consequences. And as no human being will live long enough to see the sum-total of the consequences of any of his actions—for the ultimate consequence cannot be known until time comes to an end—we can never say that a given action is absolutely good or absolutely bad.

   How then are we to choose between right and wrong conduct? Choose we must, somehow; ‘life’s business’, as Browning says, ‘being just the terrible choice.’ Some years ago, certain persons wished to introduce into Western Australia a certain kind of deer. It was pointed out, however, that this very species had been introduced into South Africa, had eaten farmers out of house and home, and had been in fact a greater plague than ever the rabbit was in Australia. The persons who were preparing to do this thing without inquiry into the consequence of similar procedure in other countries would have been guilty, had they had their way, not merely of a bad action, but of a wrong action. It would be of no use to plead that their intentions were good—we know what road is paved with good intentions. It would be of no use to tell us that their consciences had commended the act; it is a common and deadly fallacy, that a mysterious faculty called the conscience absolves us from the duty of finding out, to the best of our ability, the probable consequences of our action.  Consideration of Mr. Thatcher and his basket of rabbits thus brings us round to the conclusion reached so many centuries ago by Socrates. Virtue is knowledge.

终于show完了~
呵呵……
有点长……

正在看,揣摩中,一会给你答复

是这样的
在撒切尔将兔子引入澳大利亚后,由于间隔时间太长,那些运动家就失去了兴趣,于是,撒切尔不得不把那些兔子当街叫卖,但是那些兔子频繁出生,到最后实在卖不掉,撒切尔就把兔子全放了,结果给整个澳大利亚带来了瘟疫

这篇文章旨在评论到底撒切尔的做法是对的还是错的,也许有人会说撒切尔做的是错的,因为他给澳洲大陆带来了瘟疫,但不能否认撒切尔引入兔子是为了丰富那些运动家的生活,他也没有想过要给澳洲带来瘟疫,也根本预测不到会带来这么大的灾难.

至于你所说的兔子和morality什么关系
我给你解释一下:其实作者在第一段已经强调了,"On Rabbits, Morality"
rabbits和morality之间是有逗点号的,还风趣地说照排机千万不能漏掉这个细节
但还有很多人看到题目,被欺骗了,以为这篇文章是讲rabbits morality的
其实"on rabbits,morality"这个题目的意思是由兔子引发的人的道德观的问题

感谢斑竹！

刚才重复看了几遍，觉得这篇文章说的是“考虑问题的两面性”~
做事情之前，应该要考虑后果，虽然有些事情的后果并不那么明显，不能在短时间之内看出来~~

原来我问兔子和道德观之间有什么联系~~ 呵呵~
其实那个时候我是看不出作者是如何将讲述兔子的故事过渡到谈论marality~~
现在看明白了！因为那个人把大量的兔子放生，导致了一场灾难，从而说到座事情必须要考虑short-term and long-term consequences~~

一个下午就搞定这么一篇文章…… 真是丢脸~~
还是在斑竹的提示下搞清楚的……
anyway, thank you so much！

Summary of Walter Murdoch's “On Rabbits, Morality, Etc.”

Walter Murdoch in “On Rabbits, Morality, Etc.” talks about how to determine whether our actions are “good” or “bad” from morality, and short-term, long-term consequences of the auctions. Usually, when we consider an auction as a “simple separate whole”, we make a mistake on our judgment. Using the introduction of the rabbits to Australia as an example, Walter Murdoch shows us that even though we can’t see the long-term consequences of our auctions immediately sometimes, long-term consequences of our auctions are much more important than the short-term consequences of our auctions, and before we do anything, we must consider it deeply.

Around 1863, an agent named Mr. Thatcher was asked to introduce rabbits to Australia. He had succeeded introducing rabbits to Australia at his forth trip. However, because of the delay, the sportsmen were no longer interested in coursing the rabbits. Mr. Thatcher was unable to sell his rabbits, then he made a moral judgment, he decided to quit the business of selling rabbits and to release them into the nature. “Mr. Thatcher’s action, in introducing the rabbit into Australia, a good action or a bad one?” With hindsight and common sense, we know that his decision was a big mistake, a bad one, because he had too many rabbits. Mr. Thatcher’s decision had brought a plague to Australia. However, from Mr. Thatcher’s point of view, is he absolutely wrong? Is anything wrong with Mr. Thatcher’s passion and diligent in his job of bringing the rabbit to Australia? “He is unquestionably to be praised for his zeal, his enthusiasm, his unconquerable persistence in what he thought to be an admirable project.” “We can never say that a given action is absolutely good or absolutely bad.” When Mr. Thatcher opened the baskets and released the rabbits, nothing bad happened immediately; although ten years later, the consequences of releasing those rabbits began to effect. “An action must be considered with its consequences; with the sum-total of its consequences.” Even though there is something that no human beings will be able to live long enough to see the results. “How then are we to choose between right and wrong conduct?” Several years ago, someone wanted to introduce deer into Western Australia; same species had been introduced into South Africa and was considered a greater plague than the ever rabbit was in Australia. Unlike Mr. Thatcher, the persons who were suggesting the introduction was making a bad action and bad judgment, they didn’t inquiry into the consequence of similar procedure in other countries. Mr. Thatcher’s experience is well known by now, “Virtue is knowledge.”

上面的summary，请大家帮忙看看有没有语法错误……
：-）

晕！
斑竹该跟你收费了，哈！~

基本上能够把道理讲清，但错误不少,有些句子比较死板,有的地方有chinglish痕迹

Summary of Walter Murdoch's “On Rabbits, Morality, Etc.”
Walter Murdoch in “On Rabbits, Morality, Etc.” talks about how to  determine from morality whether our actions are “good” or “bad” , and short-term and long-term consequences of the actions. Usually, when we consider an action as a “simple separate whole”, we make a mistake on our judgment. Taking the introduction of the rabbits into Australia for example, Walter Murdoch shows us that even though we can’t see the long-term consequences of our actions immediately sometimes, the long-term consequences of our actions are much more important than the short-term ones of our actions, and before we do anything, we must consider it deeply.

Around 1863, a traveling agent named Mr. Thatcher was asked to introduce rabbits into Australia. He had succeeded in introducing rabbits into Australia at his fourth trip. However, because of the delay, the sportsmen were no longer interested in coursing the rabbits. Mr. Thatcher was unable to sell his rabbits, then he made a moral judgment, he decided to quit the business of selling rabbits and to release them into the nature. “Mr. Thatcher’s action, in introducing the rabbit into Australia, a good action or a bad one?” With hindsight and common sense, we know that his decision was a big mistake, a bad one, because he had too many rabbits. Mr. Thatcher’s decision had brought a plague to Australia. However, from Mr. Thatcher’s point of view, is he absolutely wrong? Is there anything wrong with Mr. Thatcher’s passion and diligence in his job of bringing the rabbit to Australia? “He is unquestionably to be praised for his zeal, his enthusiasm and his unconquerable persistence in what he thought to be an admirable project.” “We can never say that a given action is absolutely good or  bad.” When Mr. Thatcher opened the baskets and released the rabbits, nothing bad happened immediately; although ten years later, the consequences of releasing those rabbits began to affect. “An action must be considered with its consequences; with the sum-total of its consequences.” Even though there is something of which no human beings will be able to live long enough to see the results. “How then are we to choose between right and wrong conduct?” Several years ago, someone wanted to introduce deer into Western Australia; the same species had been introduced into South Africa and was considered a greater plague than the ever rabbit was in Australia. Unlike Mr. Thatcher, the persons who were suggesting the introduction was making a bad action and bad judgment, they didn’t inquiry into the consequence of similar procedure in other countries. Mr. Thatcher’s experience is well known by now, “Virtue is knowledge.”

要仔细研究一下……
感谢斑竹啊~~
给我这么好的一个学习提高的机会~~！！！
超级感谢！！！

终稿~~
再次感谢斑竹！

Walter Murdoch in “On Rabbits, Morality, Etc.” talks about how to determine whether our actions are morally “good” or “bad,” along with the short-term and long-term consequences of the actions. Usually, when we consider an action as a “simple separate whole,” we make a mistake of judgment. Taking the introduction of the rabbits into Australia as an example, Murdoch shows us that even though we can’t see the long-term consequences of our actions immediately sometimes, the long-term consequences of our actions are much more important than the short-term ones of our actions, and before we do anything, we must consider it deeply.

Around 1863, a traveling agent named Mr. Thatcher was asked to introduce rabbits into Australia. He succeeded in introducing rabbits into Australia on his fourth trip. However, because of the delay, the sportsmen were no longer interested in hunting rabbits. Mr. Thatcher was unable to sell his rabbits, then he made a moral judgment, he decided to quit the business of selling rabbits and to release them into wild. Mr. Thatcher’s action, introducing the rabbit into Australia, with hindsight and common sense, we know was a big mistake, a bad one; Mr. Thatcher’s decision brought a plague of rabbits to Australia. However, from Mr. Thatcher’s point of view, he is not absolutely wrong. There is nothing wrong with Mr. Thatcher’s passion and diligence in his job of bringing the rabbit to Australia. “He is unquestionably to be praised for his zeal,” “We can never say that a given action is absolutely good or bad.” When Mr. Thatcher opened the baskets and released the rabbits, nothing bad happened immediately; although ten years later, the consequences of releasing those rabbits began to affect. “An action must be considered with its consequences; with the sum-total of its consequences” even though no human beings will be able to live long enough to see the results. Several years ago, someone wanted to introduce deer into Western Australia; the same species had been introduced into South Africa and was considered a greater plague than the rabbit ever was in Australia. Unlike Mr. Thatcher, the persons who were suggesting the introduction were making a bad action and bad judgment, because they didn’t inquire into the consequence of similar procedure in other countries. Mr. Thatcher’s experience is well known by now, “Virtue is knowledge.”