Beyond the Pale (1897):

a machine-readable transcription

Caird, Mona (1854-1932)

Victorian Women Writers Project: an Electronic Collection

Beyond the Pale. An Appeal on Behalf of the Victims of Vivisection.

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BEYOND THE PALE. AN APPEAL ON BEHALF OF THE VICTIMS OF VIVISECTION.

BY

MONA CAIRD.

(front)
PRINTED BY WILLIAM REEVES, 185, FLEET STREET, E.C.

BEYOND THE PALE.

CHAPTER I.

animals, his position is that of an omnipotent god. Dare he say that he has proved himself a just or a merciful one?

        Really adequate quotation is impossible, in the space I have at command, but I desire not merely to assert my own conviction, but to point out the nature of the evidence on which it is founded, I propose to indicate, by a few extracts, the character of the practice which is tolerated by the public and treated by its supporters, as not merely permissible, but actually laudable and worthy of the applause of those who have the welfare of their race at heart.

        I would strenuously urge all to consult the original sources of information for themselves, for what I adduce is necessarily a mere fragment of the vast mass from which it is taken. In the literature published by those who have been led, through such research, to oppose the practice of experiments on living animals, quotations from the works of physiologists are almost invariably given, with careful references to chapter and page, so that the source of information can be verified by the reader.+ Anyone therefore can convince himself of the facts, and it surely behoves him to either con-
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+ All information as to literature on the subject and the means of obtaining it, can be had at the London Anti-Vivisection Society, 32, Sackville Street, and from the Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, 20, Victoria Street, Westminster, London, S.W. Many of the original works can be seen there, and most are obtainable at the British Museum.

sult the evidence, or to cease to repeat the parrot-cry: "no cruelty is perpetrated by vivisectors." If he finds that torture is inflicted, a question arises that is not merely technical or scientific, and one on which every layman has a right, and indeed a duty, to form an opinion: viz., Does man's power over animals justify him in torturing them for his own benefit?

        The present controversy as to whether or not torture is inflicted, is truly ludicrous, seeing that numberless volumes of evidence are extant, written by the physiologists themselves, wherein the contentions of their opponents are proved, and proved again. Indeed the evidence of the operators in these terrible experiments on living creatures, is practically the sole evidence that exists on the subject. Yet so truly ironical is Fate, that this is the evidence that pro-vivisectors deny with so much anger and scorn!

        There are some persons who are able to believe that anti-vivisectionists have originated this movement merely for the love of agitation, and to these, of simple faith, one can but repeat: Consult the evidence.

        It is extremely difficult--I believe almost impossible--for any person not favourable to the practice of vivisection to obtain admission into a physiological laboratory, when the really important experiments are going on. Mr. Amos Waters (Agnostic Journal, June 24, 1892), records an instance when he obtained admission, but he was bound on his honour not to describe the operations that took place (itself rather a significant fact); therefore he can give no details; he can only tell us that "he came out into the sunshine of the outer world sickened, shocked, and revolted beyond measure; the twittering of free and happy birds seemed to thrill the air with tremulous agony, and such agony so miserably meaningless and inexpressibly pitiful" was that he had left behind. "I thought of the Inquisition tortures for the good of souls. Alas! how blind we mortals are."

        I begin, not with the account of an experiment, but with a quotation from Dr. Hoggan on the subject of anæsthetics.

Although the facts he brings forward are well known to those who have any knowledge at all on the subject, the vast majority are perfectly ignorant of it, and are under the erroneous impression that anæsthetics, as they are given to vivisected animals, are always a real safe-guard to the animal against pain. For this reason I quote the passage almost in full. (The italics are all mine.)

        Dr. Hoggan in the Spectator, May 29th, 1875 says:--"The incalculable advantages which mankind has derived from chloroform as a means of destroying the sense of pain have remained a dead letter as regards the lower animals, in consequence of the very unsatisfactory state of our knowledge of the line which separates insensibility from death, especially in some of those classes of animals that are most generally employed as the subjects of physiological experimentation. Many of these die apparently before they can become insensible through chloroform, some of them, indeed as soon as it has been administered. The practical consequence of this uncertainty is that complete and conscientious anæsthesia is seldom ever attempted, the animal getting at most a slight whiff of chloroform, by way of satisfying the conscience of the operator or of enabling him to make statements of a humane character. Not only, however, are numerous cases to be regarded with due suspicion ... but we have also to bear in mind that even where complete insensibility has been produced at the beginning of an operation, this effect only lasts for, at most, a minute or two, and during the rest of the operation, lasting perhaps for hours, the animal must bear its torture as it best may. Continued insensibility could only be maintained by continued careful administration by a special assistant. This, I believe, is seldom, if ever done:... and even if it were so, we should be leaving entirely out of sight that numerous class of operations in which anæsthetics cannot be used, as they would interfere with the correctness of the results: and where, if used, they would render the experiment worse than useless. Personally,

I may add, that the first experiments which I attempted to make, as a student, in my own private room, failed, because my anxiety to produce anæsthesia, I found that the animal had died before the experiment could be commenced: this too at a time when I had much experience in administering chloroform in the operating theatre of the hospital. I, therefore, gave up the idea of trying such experiments, until I had had an opportunity of seeing how experienced vivisectors manage it. I have since then had ample opportunity of seeing, and the result of my experience was embodied in a remark I made in a letter published three months ago, that I am inclined to look upon anæsthetics as the greatest curse to vivisectible animals."

        It is clear, then, according to this and other medical evidence, that in studying the accounts of experiments, we dare not jump to the pleasant conclusion that because the animal is said to have been put under an anæsthetic, it felt nothing during the whole course of the experiment--leaving out of count, of course, what it endures after recovery, if allowed to live. As I think Dr. Hoggan points out elsewhere, it is the public, not the animal, that is rendered insensible.

        I now proceed to quote the account of an experiment, from the Journal of Physiology, Vol. 13, No. 5, p.445, not because it is by any means among the most terrible, but because it brings forward, in short space, one or two important points. I copied it, among many others, into a note-book, when studying this and other physiological works in the British Museum.

        "Lannois and Lépine used the intact animal. They opened the abdomen, isolated with ligatures that part of the intestine upon which they desired to make observations, and injected into this part the particular fluid they were using. They then replaced the intestine, sewed up the abdominal wall. After an interval of an hour or more the animal was killed," (italics mine) "and the contents of the isolated portion examined." Then follow some remarks upon the nature of the conclusions to be drawn from the experiment, which

appear not to be relied upon. "It appears possible that in the unanæsthetised animal, the obstructions instituted may have largely hindered normal processes and probably more so than if the animal had been kept under a narcotic." (Italics mine). Here, then, it is beyond all dispute, that the animal was not under an anæsthetic, and that it had to endure its suffering for "an hour or more." (I may note, in passing, that narcotics are not true anæsthetics, and are powerless to render the creature safe against pain, even for the moment; but as to this point, the testimony of the celebrated vivisector, Claude Bernard will presently be adduced.)

        In the experiment quoted above, "the unanæsthetised animal" is spoken of as having inconveniences as regards results, in this case, and "a narcotic" is referred to as the sort of "anæsthetic" that would naturally be employed, if any were used at all. Morphia, be it remembered, is a narcotic, and has the character of all narcotics.

        Now this is what Claude Bernard, the celebrated vivisector, says about narcotics in the "Revue des Cours Scientifiques," Vol. VI., p.446: "You see that the animal has fallen into a state of stupefaction, which leaves them absolutely motionless, for it is evident that if he had not received the morphia, he would not remain thus stretched upon this table without attempting to escape. He has then lost consciousness of the place he is in, he no longer recognises his master. Nevertheless sensibility persists" (italics mine), "for if we pinch the animal, he stirs and cries. But these are only reflex actions.... His intellectual faculties are completely benumbed.... You see, moreover, that morphia plunges dogs into a state of immobility which allows one to place them on the experimenting trough without tying or muzzling them."

        Again, Claude Bernard speaks of the nature of another drug that has actually been used as if it were a true anæsthetic, "the hellish wourali," as Tennyson calls it, or curare, as it is called by physiologists. Claude Bernard, in the Revue Scientifique 1871-2, p.892, says "Curare, acting on the

nervous system only suppresses the actions of the motor nerves, leaving sensation intact." (Italics mine.) ... "Curare is not an anæsthetic."

        In the same Review for 1874-5, p.1117, he speaks of human patients who have been under the influence of this terrible drug. They give testimony to the frightful pain they suffered, and relate that "during paralysis they had been fully aware of their existence and of all that happened around them."

        Vulpian gives the same testimony ("Leçons sur l'appareil vasomoteur." Paris, 1875, p.660).

        Although the following quotation is long, I will cite it, as it will serve two purposes: first, that of giving an idea of the unutterable agony caused by the use of this awful poison, on the testimony of the man who is so well qualified to speak on the subject, and second: that of providing an example that no one can deny or explain away, of the hardening effect of the practice of vivisection upon the character; (since this is a truism that is actually disputed). We see here, by his own testimony, how thoroughly Claude Bernard understood the unspeakable anguish that he was causing, yet we see also that he did not hesitate for a moment to inflict it; in fact, he spent his life in inflicting it; and if we may judge from the whole tenour of his writings, he appears to have derived actual pleasure from his ghastly work. Yet this many is spoken of with respect and admiration by his countrymen, and our leading English physiologists were liberal in their subscriptions towards the statue that was erected in his honour, wherein he is represented, scalpel in hand, with a tortured dog lying in a trough at his feet.

        In his famous paper on Curare ("Revue des Deux Mondes," Sept., 1864, p.173), this prince of vivisectors says: "If in fact we now approach the essential part of our subject, we enter by means of experiments into the organic analysis of vital extinction, we discover that this death which appears to steal on in so gentle a manner and so exempt

from pain, is, on the contrary, accompanied by the most atrocious sufferings that the mind of man can conceive." (Italics mine). On p.162 he says: "In this motionless body, behind that glazing eye, and with all the appearance of death, sensitiveness and intelligence persist in their entirety. This corpse before us hears and distinguishes all that is done around it. It suffers when pinched or irritated: in a word, it still has consciousness and volition, but it has lost the instruments which serve to manifest them."

        He adds ("Leçons de Physiologie Opératoire," 1879, p.168), "Curare is now employed as a means of restraint in a large number of experiments.* There are but few operations of which the narrative does not commence by notifying that they were made on a curarised dog."

        Now this man, who subjects sentient creatures to this unspeakable anguish, can record his deeds coolly and deliberately, in a periodical known to all the world, without evidently the faintest notion that he is describing acts that any reasonable person could object to.

        But what is still more bewildering and ominous, is that mankind not only exhibits no indignation or revolt, but actually erects a statue in his honour! The vivisector, alas, did not miscalculate when he appealed to the unutterable selfishness of the being, who claims kingship over the whole creation on the ground of his mental and moral superiority--which he thus proves! To those who are studying this subject, at first hand, in the vivisectors' own works, this pompous justification of a particularly cowardly form of cruelty has almost the effect of a ghastly joke!

        Perchance by means of this indescribable anguish of help-
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*
        "Le curare est aujourd hui employé comme moyen de contention dans un grand nombre d'exériences."

        Curare is the poison used by the Indians to poison their arrows, and many travellers who have experienced its effects give testimony to its peculiar and terrible potency. Yet certain English physiologists are actually beginning to deny this.

less animals, the superior being may discover how to ward off some of the unpleasant consequences of his sins, or of his preposterous ignorance of the laws of nature. Let the torturer, therefore be cheered on to his work: let the cries of anguish go up day by day, and often night after night; nay, let the animal be held in the awful spell that forbids even the expression of its agony, forbids a movement or a groan, though it lies unbound in the torture-trough, in a horrible semblance of liberty. Let man buy his knowledge by this means, let him dedicate his brother to the hideous work though his nature become flint in the process--yes, though he come to love the torture for its own sake, and to develop the horrible lust of cruelty that lurks in the depths of the human heart, to spring forth, tiger-like, when training and conditions combine to stimulate it, and to discourage the sympathetic and the pitiful instincts that alas, take so little to destroy!*

        Though Claude Bernard's deeds can only be described as devilish, it is unlikely that he was morally below the average of his contemporaries, who applauded his life-work so enthusiastically. It was training and conditions; above all, it was the acquiescence of his fellows which encouraged him in his downward path and ended in producing a character such as his works reveal. The same awful callousness is betrayed, nay proclaimed with pride, in all the works of his colleagues, when they are written, as they are on the con-
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*
        Montesquieu appears to have fully realized the effect upon human nature of the opportunity to cruelty and tyranny. In his "Esprit des Lois." Vol. II., p.257, he says "It" (slavery) "is useful neither to the master nor to the slave...... to the former because he ...... accustoms himself insensibly to the loss of all moral virtues, because he becomes insolent, hasty, hard, furious, licentious and cruel." (Italics mine).

        Montesquieu does not say: Some men, born peculiarly cruel, become in the position of slave-owners, hasty, hard, and so forth--but he says, in general: The master develops these bad qualities--, showing that Montesquieu attributes them to the man's conditions and not to his disposition.

tinent, without fear of arousing any section of the public to remonstrance. These men probably torture an animal with no more compunction than a sportsman will shoot a partridge, and in both cases, it is not the inborn nature of the man, but the training, and the opinions of those around him which really have engendered the deed.*

        In attempting to decide the relation between character and environment and their proportionate influence, let us not forget that average human nature has acquiesced in bear-baiting, bull-fighting, witch-burning, the persecution of heretics; to say nothing of the torturing of slaves and "free labourers" in early ages, as an ordinary form of punishment. It has seen no wrong in gladiatorial contest, in the flinging of Christians to be devoured by wild beasts, in their destruction by fire and sword. It has not only justified but applauded, as proofs of a righteous zeal, the subsequent persecution of one sect of Christians by another sect, merely because they differed on the question of Church Government, or in some microscopical point of doctrine. It has encouraged and inflamed hatred, malice and all uncharitableness towards
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* The scene in "Cymbeline" between the Queen and Doctor Cornelius may be quoted here. In this case, the doctor remonstrates against the vivisecting spirit of the Queen, who has commanded him to bring her
                    "most poisonous compounds
Which are the movers of a languishing death;
But though slow, deadly,"
"Is it not meet?" asks the Queen,
"That I did amplify my judgment in
Other conclusions? I will try the forces
Of these thy compounds on such creatures as
We count not worth the hanging (but none human).
To try the vigour of them, and apply
Allayments to their act; and by them gather
Their several virtues, and effects."

    CORNELIUS:

                    "Your Highness.
Shall from this practice but make hard your heart,"
Besides, the seeing these effects will be
Both noisome and infectious."

those who presumed to dissent from the more powerful schools of thought, on any question of doctrine or of conduct whatsoever. I have said that average human nature has seen no wrong in all this; but as a matter of fact, nature very much above the average has seen no wrong in it. Was the great and merciful Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who yet did not shrink from watching the horrible scenes in the arena of the Roman ampitheatre, not above the average of mankind? Do we hear that the famous Roman thinkers and philosophers and patriots raised a protest against the daily atrocities of that place of martyrdom? Have we a record of any of the distinguished churchmen, or even of the saints, objecting to the burning of heretics; to the awful martyrdom of those fellow-creatures who thought about religion in a manner slightly different from that which the governing majority held to be right? I cannot recall a single instance of such toleration even among the saints;--unless we may perhaps except that moral genius St. Francis.

        What then are we to expect of ordinary men? Yet unless we are to conclude that all these multitudes of ordinary and extraordinary people were intrinsically and hopelessly bad, we are driven to the alternative conclusion that they were, at least, fairly well intentioned and conscientious people, who certainly did not go out of their way to lead cruel and evil lives. And yet these very men and women acquiesced in deeds that, in their essential nature, are simply atrocious. Surely this ought to show us the utter folly of supposing that a good man--as the standard of his time goes--can do no wrong. He may be "good," and yet commit diabolical deeds with the applause of his countrymen. In fact it takes nothing short of a special "revelation" (however the word may be interpreted) to create a new standard. It is to create new standards that Buddhas and Christs are born now and then into the savage old world, to plead with us that we make

not life into a hell for one another, and for all living beings within our accursed reach.*

        The following quotation will give a vivid impression of the ideal aimed at by the leaders of the vivisectionist school. I quote from Cyon's "Methodik der physiologischen Experimente und Vivisectionen" (Giessen, St. Petersburg, 1876). In the preface to the work, the author says: "The true vivisector must approach a difficult vivisection with the same joyful excitement and the same delight wherewith a surgeon undertakes a difficult operation from which he expects extraordinary consequences. He who shrinks from cutting into a living animal, he who approaches a vivisection as a disagreeable necessity, may very likely be able to repeat one or two vivisections, but he will never become an artist in vivisection." (Italics mine.) He who cannot follow some fine nerve-thread, scarcely visible to the naked eye, into the depths, if possible sometimes tracing it to a new branching, with joyful alertness for hours at a time; he who feels no enjoyment when at last, parted from its surroundings and isolated, he can subject that nerve to electrical stimulation;
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*
        The views of the "intimate councillor" of the Prince of Orange "the accomplished Saint Aldegonde," as Motley calls him, are extremely significant in relation to the subject. Prince William was far too tolerant to please the Saint. He was in despair because the Prince refused to exclude the Anabaptists of Holland from the rights of citizenship. To William "it was a bitter disappointment ... to see wise statesmen of his own creed unable to rise to the idea of toleration." Motley gives Saint Aldegonde's own words. "The Prince objects to exclude them" (the Anabaptists) "from citizenship. He answered me sharply that their yea was equal to our oath, and that we should not press this matter" (their exclusion) "unless we were willing to confess that it was just for the Papists to compel us to a Divine Service which was against our consciences."

        It seems hardly credible,"Motley continues, "that this sentence containing so sublime a tribute to the character of the Prince should have been indited as a bitter censure, and that too by an enlightened and accomplished Protestant.--MOTLEY'S RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC, Vol. II., p.241.

or when, in some deep cavity, guided only by the sense of touch of his finger-ends, he ligitures and divides an invisible vessel--to such there is wanting that which is most necessary for a successful vivisector. The pleasure of triumphing over difficulties held hitherto insuperable is always one of the highest delights of the vivisector. And the sensation of the physiologist, when from a gruesome wound, full of blood and mangled tissue, he draws forth some delicate nerve branch, and calls back to life a function which was already extinguished--this sensation has much in common with that which inspires a sculptor, when he shapes forth fair living forms from a shapeless mass of marble." (p.15)

        Now, although this attitude of mind, in its utter ruthlessness, appears to me to be absolutely diabolical--the popular "Devil" really seems a genial, kindly creature compared with this "artist in vivisection"--yet, alas, I fear there is not one man in ten thousand who could have been subjected to the same training as that which Cyon received, without becoming similar in character to this merciless torturer. The average man will accept with a light heart all that he has been trained to regard as justifiable and as a matter of course, no matter how cruel or how atrocious. The average cook, for instance, is not usually a fiend incarnate, yet she will boil a live lobster, often slowly, and smile indulgently, if not scornfully, at any remonstrance, not because she is abnormally cruel, but because she is normally unthinking. "Everybody does it," is the only justification to which she will condescend, and she evidently regards it as more than sufficient.

        (I may suggest, in passing, to mistresses of households, to take note of this ghastly habit, and to remember that as lobsters can scarcely be killed in any other way, it is surely incumbent on people calling themselves "civilized" to refrain from eating a creature that has to be doomed to so horrible a death.

        We must never forget, then, that the average man will run in the direction of least resistance. All history tells the

same tale. The best men will do, without a qualm, in one age, that which the worst would hesitate to commit in another. Not one in a million adopts and acts upon a moral standard distinctly different from that which is accepted in his circle. Of desperate moment then, is that standard, which we are all engaged in confirming, or making, or unmaking, every day of our lives. Except for purposes of altering current opinion, minds of original power need not be counted. We may rest assured that in a society where it was regarded as a matter of course, for instance, that every respectable family should partake of boiled infant for its regular Christmas dinner, not merely the heartless and cruel, but the kind and good members of the community would sit round and enjoy the dish with perfect cheerfulness, and march off to church with the same sense of virtue and the same irreproachable demeanour that distinguishes our pillars of society, at the present unimpeachable moment.

        It is not the great gulf which they assume between infant and turkey, so much as the vast chasm between what everybody does and what nobody does, that is really at the bottom of their conduct, and of their ardent convictions on this and on all other matters, religious and secular. And the vivisectors do not au fond differ from the rest of the world. It is idle to attack them while leaving their multitude of supporters unchallenged. The most hardened vivisector would not dine on infant (even if the law did not interfere) unless public opinion were more or less favourable to the practice, or apathetic in regard to it.* Nor would they pursue their
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*
        The last clause of Montesquieu's burlesque apology for slavery is a very slight caricature of an argument which he had doubtless heard again and again, an argument that has probably been used by the upholders of all disgraceful institutions since the world began. I quote it below. One can almost see before one, as one reads, the well-groomed person of balanced views descanting on the slave question! "Small minds exaggerate too much the injustice that is said to be done to the negroes, for if it was such as they assert, would it not have occurred to the princes of Europe who make among themselves so many useless treaties, to make a universal one in favour of mercy and pity?" (Montesquieu, "Esprit des Lois," Vol. II., p.246).

        "Small minds," (echo the vivisectionists), "exaggerate the cruelty of vivisection, for if it were such as they assert, would it not have occurred to the physiologists, who make among themselves so many useless treaties," (they do indeed!) "to make a universal one in favour of mercy and pity?" And so we are to conclude that slavery and vivisection are not wrong?

present work of torture unless their own particular public more or less approved and encouraged it. For my own part, I think the public ought to be held, in some respects, more responsible than the vivisectors, whose better instincts have been benumbed by their long apprenticeship to cruelty.

        It is the height of folly to say, as one so often hears the more ignorant supporters of vivisection say: "Medical men are all so humane; therefore we may trust them to pursue this method of research." This amounts to saying: "Medical men are so humane, therefore let us subject them to every temptation to cruelty, and afford them every opportunity of curing themselves of their natural humanity."

        In Vol. XIII. of the Journal of Physiology, p.467, an experiment is recorded under choral, which is not a true anæsthetic, but a narcotic, and therefore could not fully protect from pain if at all. (See above, pages 8 and 9).

        "A rabbit had cervical sympathetic nerve tied and cut, also third nerve in skull tied and cut, the anterior part of the brain being removed."

        In Vol. XIII. p.773, Journal of Physiology, Dec. 1892, an article signed Howard Tooth begins as follows: (I do not quote details, as the opening sentence shows the nature of the experiments).

        "In the course of a series of experiments on monkeys at the Laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians and

Surgeons, made with a view to determine the paths of sensation (in the broadest sense of different impressions) in the cord and medulla --" etc.

        It may be left to the reader to infer whether experiments on the "paths of sensation" are likely to have been performed when the animal was insensible, and whether such experiments were likely to be painless.

        It is observable that in experiments on the nature of pain or on the course of sensation, where it would be obviously ridiculous to state that true anæsthetics have been administered, extreme caution is observed, in English journals, in giving the details of the experiments. On the continent, on the other hand, where no public opinion is to be feared, such details are freely recorded, as when Mantegazza describes, in his Physiology of Pain, his ingenious apparatus for creating the greatest agony that was possible to be contrived. (He was making researches into the nature of pain.) It would be a relief to believe the man mad, who could deliberately watch, as he says himself, "with much delight and patience," the intolerable anguish that he describes; but unfortunately, we find that the possession of opportunities and exposure to the particular temptations of the physiologist, always produce madness of an exactly similar kind, and that the rage seems to become cruel and terrible in almost exact proportion to the fulness of the power and to the completeness of the public apathy or approval of this awful abuse.

        But to return to our English vivisectors, who are more guarded in their descriptions, but I greatly fear, are not more guarded in their experiments. Dr. Klein, (the well-known German vivisector who pursues his researches in this country) told the Royal Commission that he saw no difference between English and foreign vivisectional practice.

        I now quote from the Journal of Physiology, Vol. XIII., p.779. "The exact function of the ascending root has yet to be determined but it is more than probable that it conducts touch, pain and temperature sensations

from the face. I have, since writing this, however, made one more experiment of a similar nature, and in this animal, I was unable to satisfy myself that there was any loss of sensation in the face.... Moreover, Dr. Mott has been able by means of a specially devised knife, to cut the antero-latero ascending track in the cervical cord with great accuracy. In his cases there have been no signs of any loss of sensation, though there was some loss of equilibration."

        Anyone who will read Dr. Carpenter's well-known "Physiology," will find allusions to or descriptions of painful experiments on every second page. They are sometimes described in such technical language that translation is an advantage, as for instance, when he describes M. Chossat's experiments in starving dogs to death, as a study of "the results of an entire deficiency of food and its supply in a measure inadequate to the wants of the system."* He says that "Schleffer found in a dog wholly deprived of water, the loss of the different organs was nearly the same as in the deprivation of solid food."+ Ordinary persons would call this "death from thirst."

        I now take a few of the experiments quoted by Mark Thornhill, in his paper entitled "English Vivisection" (1885). In order that I may be able, as a matter of form, to vouch for their correctness myself, the original sources have been consulted. In the British Medical Journal, 1884, Dr. Cheyne writes (p.645), Feb. 11th, 1882: "Incisions were made antiseptically into the lumbar muscles on each side in a large rabbit. A croton-oil tube was introduced on each side, the muscles and skin were stitched over them with cat-gut ... the wounds healed ... On April 6th, the tubes were burst by pressure. Swellings formed on each side. On May 3rd, the rabbit was killed. On making incisions through the skin
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* Note Carpenter's Physiology; 5th Ed., p.55.

and muscles, large abscesses containing cheesy pus, were found deeply seated."

        Mark Thornhill comments as follows on this operation:--"Stated in ordinary language, the experiment amounted to this:--the loins of the animal were cut open, and glass tubes filled with an irritating liquid were embedded in the wounds; ultimately the tubes were broken, and the liquid escaping diffused itself among the lacerated tissues, producing violent inflammation, resulting in extensive abscesses." The reader will note that the experiment occupied a period of nearly three months. During the greater part of this period, the rabbit must have endured much suffering and during a portion of the time, namely, while the abscesses were forming, its sufferings must have been very acute. The experiment, in this and other forms, appears to have been tried on a considerable number of rabbits. The condition of one of these is thus described:--"The skin was involved in the gangrene and the whole became a putrid mass, full of organisms." It is obvious that in these experiments, anæsthetics could not have been used, except for the actual operations. But is is not state that they were administered even for these."

        Another series of experiments by Drs. Lauder Brunton and Theodore Cash are quoted by Mark Thornhill from the October No. of "The Practitioner," 1884, and this quotation I have also verified. Mark Thornhill comments as follows:--"The experiments consisted in the exposure of several cats to a "rise of temperature" and to "very high temperature." This "exposure" would appear however from the description to have been something not very different from baking alive. It is mentioned, for example, that one of the cats died from heat (hyperpyrexia) when the temperature of the body had reached 46°.6 and that another cat began to suffocate at a degree of heat a little lower."

        The duration of the experiments is given as:--

1st.	3 hrs.	40 min.
2nd.	5 hrs.	0 min.
3rd.	2 hrs.	20 min.
4th.	3 hrs.	50 min.
5th.	3 hrs.	0 min.

and it is state that "at the 90th minute natural respiration ceased and had to be conducted artificially."

        Artificial respiration is effected by slitting the windpipe and pumping air into the lungs by means of a bellows and an engine. In Ludwig's great laboratory at Leipzig, we are told "an engine is at work night and day pumping air in and out of the lungs of the animals that are the subjects of physiological researches. Many of them are left all night in their mutilated condition, kept alive by this process of artificial respiration, when Nature would have otherwise put a merciful end to their sufferings by death."

        From Miss Cobbe's book "The Modern Rack," I quote the following:--

        "Here is a little scene which my friend Dr. Hoggan (who has done so much to reveal the secrets of these torture-dens) once told me quite incidentally. It was a mere mild and ordinary one, not what is called a severe experiment at all, in short, the every-day work in a certain celebrated foreign laboratory, to whose deceased master all our leading physiologists have lately joined to raise a memorial. The room is full of costly and delicate machines, expressly constructed for a hundred kinds of experiments. You may ... judge of the truth of the assertion that it is a rare practice for which scores and hundreds of such expensive instruments are made. A little white fox-terrier has just been taken down off the torture trough. Its sides have been mangled and certain nerves cut across, so that, when it is placed on the floor, its slender hind legs only trail behind it. It will never stand on them and scour over the fields again. It crawls away as stricken animals do to hide itself in the darkest corner and cool its fever of agony by lying on the stones. Meanwhile a fine black retriever rises from the fireside. He has served for other experiments. He has had some ganglions at the base of the brain which are connected with the eyes severed, and the result is that his poor eyes, once so bright and keen, have been for several days slowly perishing and

putrefying, to the great satisfaction of the physiologists, who thus know they have cut just the right spot. The poor brute feebly rises and meets the little white terrier. I do not know anything more; I could not bear quite to hear. It was a very small incident, involving nothing like the extremes of suffering; but it gave me just a glimpse into a vivisector's workshop."

        Miss Cobbe tells the significant story of a friend whose little girl had wished to find a good home for her two guinea-pigs on coming to town, and finally gave them to the children of a certain Professor. When the little girl afterwards inquired for the guinea-pigs, "Oh," said the children, "One day when we were out Papa got them and cut them up."

        "Another friend," said Miss Cobbe, "was told by a student who witnessed the scene in Edinburgh, that a little dog, brought into a certain professor's laboratory, took alarm at the awful preparations, and turning from one to another of the assistants, stood up and begged for its life. The lads were touched, and asked the professor to allow them to pay its price and set it free. The professor told them he would teach them to have such maudlin sensibility, and not only vivisected the creature cruelly that day, but kept it till the following week's lecture, and tortured it again, till death mercifully ended its poor little existence."

        Miss Cobbe also mentions that Dr. de Noë Walker himself told her that he had seen a vivisector take a mother from her pups, "cut off its mammary glands, and put it down mutilated, bleeding, and dying among its little ones, whom it could no longer feed, but only licked in its last agony."

        There are in Miss Cobbe's, book plates illustrating some of the instruments and apparatus used in physiological laboratories. "A little saw for sawing the vertebræ," "bone forceps to open the vertebral canal," "forceps of which the teeth cross like scissors, intended to saw the bones of old animals."

        There is an illustration of Schwann's apparatus for sustaining artificial respiration, and a multitude of other instruments, of which Miss Cobbe gives the names of the makers. (In London, Messrs. Hawkley, Messrs. Cettie, Messrs. Eliott, etc.). Then come vivisecting tables, double troughs, instruments "for suspending a dog in an upright position to be maintained for several days," "for holding a dog's jaws open"; "Czermak's rabbit-holder," "Claude Bernard's stoves in which he baked animals to death." (He calls it "the study of the mechanism of death by heat.") There is also an illustration of the living dog which M. Paul Bert succeeded in stiffening into the semblance, "of a piece of wood. So proud was M. Bert of this achievement," says Miss Cobbe, "that his portrait has been exhibited in Paris, holding up the tortured animal in the attitude depicted." His own words are quoted from his book "La Pression Barométrique," p.800, and I have had the quotation verified. "Let us come," he says, "to the description of the convulsive attack" (produced by placing the victim for hours under compressed oxygen). "It is really curious and frightful" (effrayante).

        "Let us take," he continues, "a case of medium intensity. When the animal is taken out of the machine, it is generally in full tonic convulsions. The four paws are stiffened, the trunk is curved backwards, the eyes are starting from the head, the jaws clenched. Soon there is a sort of loosening, to which succeeds a new crisis of stiffenings with clonic convulsion, resembling at once a crisis of strychnine poisoning and an attack of tetanus.... Sensibility is preserved." (Italics mine). "In lighter cases, instead of attacks so violent that one may lift the animal by one paw, stiff as a piece of wood, as shown in figure 61, one observes disordered movements, local convulsions, in a word, phenomena much resembling those of poisoning by carbolic acid" (acide phenique).

        If any one imagines I have picked out the worst or

the merely exceptional cases, I can only emphatically deny it, and urge whoever doubts to consult the works to which I refer and many others on the subject that can be met with. It is indeed absolutely impossible to give any idea of the incredible atrocities that are committed in the name of science and humanity, of the hideous sights of the laboratories, of the unutterable agony that is daily suffered by the innocent and defenceless; agony that to them is rayless, hopeless, purposeless, a terrible and ceaseless accompaniment of torment to the already heart-breaking tragedies of Life. It is moreover, suffering that does not come through sin, or through disobedience to natural or to moral laws, but it is intentionally and deliberately inflicted by the stronger creature upon the weaker, in the hope that the stronger may gain by the savage treachery.

        The following is quoted from Baron Weber's "Torture Chamber of Science," an address delivered by him in Dresden.* He says: "Thirst for the fame of a discoverer rules the younger physiologists so generally and so entirely that they no longer take into consideration any other than purely scientific motives. The immediate result of every real or supposed discovery by any physiologist is, not that any question is set at rest, but that the experiments published by him are imitated and repeated all over Europe by physiological inquirers, and among these are many unpractised beginners. There are as many differences of opinion among vivisectors as there are vivisectors themselves, and accordingly an experiment, made--say at Leipsic or Berlin--is at once followed by a series of similar experiments, solely for the purpose of checking the first and of calling in question the inferences drawn therefrom. Every new experiment published in a scientific periodical opens up many questions of
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* Unless stated to the contrary, all Baron Weber's statements rest on his authority alone. His "Torture Chamber of Science," having been originally an address, gives few references.

detail, and thus the number of experiments is continually increasing in geometrical progression, and is multiplied ad infinitum. The history of vivisection shows that every generation of vivisectors will throw over the conclusions of the preceding generation, only in their turn to be discarded as erroneous by those who come after them. The most insignificant of physiologists thinks himself gifted with a genius for discovery, and it need not astonish us that, with a large proportion of inferior scientific talent among physiological inquirers, so little that is useful to science and medicine comes from their innumerable experiments.... By far the greater part of the experiments are now directed towards examining the organization of the brain and its reference to the nervous system, and for these the unfortunate animals, while being slowly tortured to death, are not even allowed the benefit of anæsthetics, as they would essentially interfere with the inferences drawn from the experiments."

        Further on, the same author says: "The German anatomist, Straus-Dürkheim, expressed himself in the following terms: 'The students learning nothing from this horrible practice of vivisecting. All the organic functions of animals placed in such a frightful condition must be altogether disturbed, and can, therefore, teach nothing new. But fanaticism is a disease that spreads, and vivisectors are springing up everywhere. One inflicts pain from curiosity, another from habit, a third in order to follow the fashion.'"

        Baron Weber goes on: "A multitude of vivisectors, for example, do not agree about the functions of the brain. This is very natural, for according to the opinion given by an eminent doctor whom I find quoted in the report of the English Royal Commission, the brain is so complicated an organ that one cannot hope ever to make any certain discoveries about it by means of vivisection. Every difference of opinion among vivisectors who seek to investigate the secrets of the brain only brings about a fresh set of

torments, the results of which are still more contradictory than the previous ones, because they depend upon influences so diverse and so altogether unknown; but they all involve cruelty and great suffering to the animal sacrificed. The pain, the torture, to many thousands of sensitive creatures is certain; the results are most uncertain and problematical."

        "The celebrated Parisian Professor, Majendie, was guilty of such horrible treatment of his unfortunate victims, that for my own part, I seriously count him among the worst criminals that have ever lived. For instance, he nailed a fine, sensitive little spaniel, which he had bought at an auction, by its four paws and its long silky ears, to the table (before anæsthetics were invented) that he might show his pupils more conveniently and uninterruptedly the separating of the nerves of the eyes, the sawing of the skull, the cutting of the spine, and the laying open of the different sets of nerves. Then he kept the poor animal, still alive, for the experiment of the next day. The same man cut the stomach out of a dog, and fastened a bladder in its place, and then observed the interesting physiological incidences in the slowly expiring animal!"

        "Professor Fyfe of Edinburgh, having once fastened a beautiful spaniel by all its feet, attached it still more surely by a stout thong which he put through the nostrils of the animal after he had made a hole through the nose with an iron instrument. He then cut open the chest and the belly to show his pupils the separate intestinal organs. The expression of agony, when the animal showed its white teeth and tried to resist, was, according to the account of an eye-witness, most horrible, for fearful pain must have been caused by the least movement of the nostrils, so sensitive in the dog. You are all probably aware of the experiment made by Professor Brachet, of Paris, in which he tried to ascertain the limits of a dog's attachment."

        (On this occasion, though Baron Weber does not give his

authority, I happen to be able to quote an account of the experiment, from John Elliotson's "Human Physiology" (p.450). Elliotson quotes, in inverted commas, Brachet's own account of the experiment, which I give in preference to Baron Weber's digest of it, simply because it is in the words of the experimenter himself, although the digest is rather shorter, and, in that respect, preferable. The following (on Elliotson's authority) are Brachet's words:--

        "I inspired a dog with the greatest aversion for me by plaguing and inflicting some pain or other upon it, as often as I saw it. When this feeling was carried to its height, so that the animal became furious as soon as it saw or heard me, I put out its eyes. I could now appear before it without its manifesting any aversion. I spoke, and immediately its barking and furious movements proved the passion which animated it.

        "I destroyed the drums of its ears and disorganized the internal ear as much as I could: when an intense inflammation which was excited had rendered him deaf, I filled up its ears with wax. He could no longer hear at all. Then I went up to its side, spoke aloud, and even caressed it, without its falling into a rage--it seems even sensible to my caresses."

        I continue now to quote from "The Torture-Chamber of Science."

        "Professor Buillaud bored through the skull of a dog in two places with a thick iron bore and inserted a red-hot iron into its brain. The animal howled and shrieked for six days, almost without cessation, although they tried with repeated blows to quiet it, so that at last, out of consideration for the neighbourhood, it had to be killed." The following is from John Elliotson's "Human Physiology," p.429. "If ever he" (Majendie), "amused himself by sticking pins into the corda oblongata of pigeons, the birds thus ornamented by him would walk and fly backwards for above a month. Professor Schliff roused public opinion in Florence against him to such a degree, by his unfeeling vivisection that he was

fortunate in being called away to Geneva, where he now resides. He vivisected more than 700 dogs yearly, so every day his hands reeked with the blood of dogs. In Paragraph 1287, of the Report" (of the Royal Commission) "you will find that in one of his books, on the 'Physiology of the Digestion,'" he says, "with many of the dogs admitted to my laboratory, I am obliged, directly after their arrival, to cut the nerves of the voice, that their nightly concert may not bring my physiological studies into bad repute with my neighbours." Professor Ferrier cut open the heads of thirteen monkeys, and he describes in a masterly manner the indication of pain shown by the poor little animals during the experiments that followed (Royal Commission). Dr. Carpenter ("Physiology," 7th edition, Pauer, p.129) "mentions a professor who filled the stomach of a dog with boiling water. The animal died in four hours. (Par. 5616, Royal Commission). Dr. de Noë Walker reports an experiment which produced inflammation in the eyes of various dogs and lambs, partly by chemical irritation, partly by drawing a linen thread through the transparent cornea of the eye." After that, the experimenter "gave the poor creature no rest, either by day or night, for their sleep would have disturbed his observations; and when the injuries began to heal he again inflicted them." (Par. 1727, Royal Commission).

        Dr. Brunton's experiments on cats are then quoted by Baron Weber. "He expressly confesses in his examination that all these cats were brought to him secretly by dealers, who, of course, had stolen them from the London streets and houses. Among the cats thus tortured to death, how many have been the pets of some woman's solitary and joyless old age?" ... "The description in the Report (p.351) of the usual apparatus for the torture of warm-blooded animals also made a very painful impression. Three of these so-called dog-holders are especially made use of, the Czermak, the Brunter and the Bernard. They are all so far alike that

they first fasten the dog down, then he is screwed quite tight to the iron machine, his muzzle is tied up and a curved piece of iron is screwed down upon his nose until the unfortunate animal encased in hard iron cannot make the slightest movement... All these vivisectors," Baron Weber continues, "in their examination before the Commission, affirmed emphatically that physiologists throughout the world were all humane, feeling people, tender-hearted angels, and that not one of them could reconcile it to his conscience to torture an animal unnecessarily. Only one of the vivisectors--and this one a German, Professor Klein of Vienna--had the courage (or the cynicism) to speak the truth honestly. "I think that with regard to an experimenter, a man who conducts special research and performs an experiment, he has no time, so to speak, for thinking what will the animal feel or suffer." He repeats this confession in par. 3562. Baron Weber then goes on as follows:--

        "What do we learn from all the experiments, carried out with such shameful cruelty, which have been unveiled before the judgment seat of the British public? In any case we learn that a large proportion of vivisectors have lost all trace of humanity and conscience, and these men treat animals in a high state of sensitiveness, and sometimes gifted with great intelligence, as if they were merely objects of scientific curiosity, merely subjects for experiments, of whose unutterable pain and agony not the least consideration need be taken."

        A little further on he significantly adds: "Precisely that stiff-necked opposition shown by the leaders of the medical profession in our country to the introduction of any laws for the protection of their victims makes it as clear as day that there exists a great necessity for insisting on them." Certainly if the outside public will not stir to aid the victims, their lot is hopeless indeed!

        "Eye-witnesses assure us that the dogs, when fastened

down ready for torture, and while being screwed into the iron apparatus, invariably lick the hands of their executioners as if they would beg for mercy!"

        Such are the facts: such is the practice whose opponents are laughed at as sentimentalists and faddists!

        I know there are many people--probably the majority--who take what I call the arithmetical view of right and wrong; that is, the theory--implied rather than formulated--that if from so much direct wrong to one being, so much good to another being is achieved, the one sum cancels the other if equal, and that the difference represents the actual loss or gain if the sums be unequal. Now as a matter of fact, I cannot find that there is even apparent profit of this kind from vivisection. Claude Bernard himself says: "Our hands are empty of results, though our mouths are full of legitimate promises for the future."

        But granted that there were such apparent profit from this crime; I should still deny that anything was gained, in the long run, even physically, to set against the awful moral degradation involved; for pain and pleasure are not mere abstract signs of quantity or number, of which one can be taken from the other, leaving a simple and indifferent plus or minus behind them.

        We cannot take one from the other. They remain eternally separate and self-existing facts. Try to subtract so much pain in the animal (call it A) from so much pleasure in men--or for that matter, in other animals--(call it B). Take A from B, and what is the result? Incoherence, absurdity. The question has no real meaning. As well might we try to give a reasonable answer to the familiar old problem: If a ship 30 feet long, by 10 feet broad, has a mast 30 feet high, and weighs 20 tons, what is the Captain's name?

        If, I repeat, A and B represent mere abstract numbers or quantities of the same nature or kind, B minus A would give an intelligible result or value (call it C) in terms of A and B. But when we deal with unlike terms, when we deal with in-

destructible realities and experiences instead of abstract quantities, mental confusion is the only result obtained by treating these things mathematically. Instead of the annihilation of a plus quantity by a minus quantity, we find that A and B (representing sensations) never reduce each other to non-existence whatever be their relative amounts. They are in their nature independent, and in their results eternal. And this is sober practical fact, while the arithmetical theory of the matter is fantastic and imaginary, as surely no clear thinker can deny.

        Pain suffered is pain suffered, and no pleasure of others can ever cancel or diminish that amount by one hairsbreath. This truism is denied by inference, by those who would set the welfare of men against the pain of animals (or the welfare of many men against the pain of one man) and bring out a triumphant plus quantity of good at the end. We may do our little subtraction sums to all eternity, and we do not alter the fact of the extremity of any individual suffering, and surely it is clear that there is no suffering except individual suffering. A mass does not experience pain or pleasure, in any sense but that which implies the separate experience of the individuals composing it. Even the pain of sympathy is suffered by each person separately, and it is surely evident that since pain in one organism cannot be balanced against pleasure in another organism, no amount of joy can ever lessen by one pang the actual irrevocable agony endured by any particular individual--heaven itself could not wipe out that agony or make it not to have been. In short, sensation and experience cannot reasonably be treated as if one were weighing a mass of sugar against another mass of sugar and deciding in favour of the mass that weighed the most.

        Granted, therefore, that we did reap some physical advantage from the anguish of a creature (animal or human), I should still deny that any real gain can be thus achieved in the general welfare (putting aside the moral question for a moment) because of this non-mathematical quality of sensation and

consciousness. And again, from another point of view, I should deny it, as emphatically as I should deny that anything was gained by a murderer who became a millionaire by his crime. His millions would make him, in all things worth having in life, poorer than the poorest. And, by the same inexorable law, a society that deliberately elected to try and escape from the natural consequences of its own sins and its evil conditions, not by repentance and sounder living, but by the cowardly torture of the weakest of living creatures, so far from gaining anything for itself would lose incalculably, in the long run, through the defiance of its best instincts. For what miracle is going to prevent such national crime against the helpless from lowering the national conscience, from weakening the sympathies and ties that bind society together, from blunting and defacing all the generous and protective impulses of mankind? And by what miracle is a people whose instincts of aggression and cruelty are thus stimulated, to avoid the tendency to social strife--and if the tendency be not unchecked--to corruption and disaster, physical and moral? All that tends to make the principle of vivisection accepted by the nation, tends, also, as night follows morning, to make the principle of enforced vicarious sacrifice accepted and justified, and thus to destroy the sentiments which help to make society even possible, and a fortiori, those which help to make it better and happier. Besides this general influence for evil, the practice (assuming that it brought us important knowledge), would also have this particular effect: that the cures, or rather, palliatives discovered by its means, would tempt people to go on neglecting to seek the true causes of their diseases; to go on sinning, and clinging to their errors and abuses, allowing these to grown more firmly rooted in the habits, the heredity and the prejudices of the race, and therefore always more hopeless of radical cure. "For sin and stupidity need not be expiated," we should tacitly assure ourselves; "our professional torturers

can easily cut up a few more thousand cats and dogs and rabbits, till they discover how to enable us to make brutes and fools of ourselves with impunity. In fact, if cats and dogs won't yield the secret, is there not plenty of clinical material in our hospitals? The day is happily past for sentimental squeamishness on these subjects. Good heavens! am I to be expected to suffer while there are hospital patients to be experimented upon? (of course under proper supervision and never without a special license.) In the interests of science and of US--why not? Oh! of course some fussy agitator must needs spring up--even in these enlightened days--and ask: "If utility to the majority be the only test, is there anybody who should be held exempt? Where are we to draw the line?" "But why draw the line at all, oh well-meaning enthusiast?--except, of course, at ME!"

        Such is, in sober fact, the nature of the logic on which vivisection now rests and the direction in which that logic is rapidly carrying us. It is a discouraging reflection that the dread of what it may lead to rather than a sense of justice or of pity, will be the leading motive for reform in the minds of many. But whatever the motive, it is to be hoped that a determined effort, not merely controversial but political and practical may be made to resist the ever-increasing tendency to this kind of research, and that England, who has prided herself on being the first to succour the oppressed, may cease to tolerate, in her statute book, a law to charter cruelty towards the defenceless, be the object what it may.

CHAPTER II.

People say perhaps: "All exaggeration," or "Very wrong, only how is one to stop it?" but at least nobody says: "Very right, that is just as it ought to be." On the other hand, if one pleads for ill-used animals who can't so much as cry out for justice, people do not even say: "It's wrong:" on the contrary, they say "It is quite right, if we can get anything for ourselves out of the creature's anguish."

        In the case of men, it is enough to prove that the wrong has been done; further pleading is superfluous; in the case of animals it is not by any means enough to prove them wronged. One has also to set to work to prove that it is wrong to wrong them. One has laboriously to prove a truism. Now where is one to go for proofs of a moral truism, except to the conscience of mankind? To that tribunal, then, I bring the cause of the creatures tortured now in our country in the name of science.

        In the preceding chapter, I have quoted evidence, in the words of the torturers themselves, for all that I assert as to the fact of the torture. At present I am dealing with the moral aspect of the question, and am trying to cope with the stupendous difficulty just noted: of appealing to the intellect and conscience of my readers in such a way that they must recognise, in all its profound significance, the relation of this subject to our whole moral sense, and our whole moral code, with its consequent influence on our destiny as a people capable of progress, and on all that such progress implies in human happiness and peace.

        It is no mere fanciful relation that I point out between this question and all other questions of right and wrong. It is a relation so close, and intimate as to have arrived, as I said before, at the position of a truism. Now truisms are always difficult to prove, because there is nothing stronger than themselves that one can adduce to support them. A truism that is not recognised as such, is almost an obstruction. Merely to state it ought to carry conviction, after the fashion of an axiom in geometry. But if it does not carry conviction, what can be said to explain and justify it? If I state that the

whole is greater than the half, and somebody disputes it, what can I say to convince him?

        Now I base my creed in this matter on what I regard as a moral truism, viz: It is wrong to establish a system of research by means involving or permitting the torture of sentient creatures, and it is wrong to do this either by active participation in the deed, or by consent to the law which sanctions it, no matter what the object of such torture may be. Such is my truism. If the reader disputes it, my task is a heavy one, and I cannot convince him directly, if at all; I can only induce him to convince himself by trying to support his own position without arriving at a logical absurdity, which he is obliged to recognise as an absurdity, if he be honest, or without finding himself forced by his own reasoning to support, at the same time, a conclusion that his reason and moral sense repudiate.

        Let us take his position and examine it. He disputes my truism, so his position is (roughly) this: "It is not wrong to establish a system of research involving the torture of sentient creatures, provided physical good to the human species may be expected from such research." The position is, at any rate, clear and logical within itself; the sort of position that one could imagine taken up by a cultivated devil.* If it were taken up by cultivated devils only, there would be comparatively little to regret, for the views of such persons carry little influence compared with those of the well-disposed and conscientious. It is when perilous principles are held by good men and true, that we have everything to fear. Probably many, if not most of our vivisectors belong to
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* "All cruelty is sin. It is the essence of all wrongs, the marrow of every crime, the delight of evil men, and the chief attribute of devils."--HARRY BENSON."When the angel of pity is driven from the heart, when the fountain of tears is dry, the soul becomes a serpent crawling in the dust of a desert."--Colonel Ingersoll."That the best Teacher does not wish us to increase in knowledge through sin and cruelty needs no demonstration.""Journal of Zoophily." Philadelphia, Pa. Aug. 1894, Vol. III. No. 8.

this class, and for that very reason they do more harm to their fellow-men than if they were, by original nature, evil and ruthless. Now if, (as they hold) it is not wrong to torture a sentient creature for the good of the highly superior "others," by what special clause are we to exempt from such torture a particular class of sentient creatures, viz., those that happen to be human? If mere power of feeling is not sufficient to give them claims upon our mercy, what is it that does justly give them that claim? How will the disputer of my truism rescue his fellow men and women from the category of vivisectible beings under which his proposition, (in disputing mine), places them? He will be forced to make some special provision in order to withdraw them from that dangerous position. But how is this to be logically done? Take a particular case. After an important vivisection of a dog, which (we will assume) gives hopes of a valuable discover, it is still impossible to be sure that what is true of a dog is also true of a man, for it has been found again and again that the results of experiments on animals are extremely misleading as to the human constitution, and at best, there can be no certainty except by actual experiment. Now here is a poor, forlorn, degraded, worthless human being; he has come to the hospital for treatment, he is in the hands of the doctor who is greatly excited and interested at the hope of a discovery. Why not make use of this otherwise useless patient to test the experiment, previously made on the dog, and perhaps do good to thousands of more valuable human beings at his expense? Nature works by sacrifice; why should not man follow her example in a good cause? Now unless my truism is a truism; unless it is wrong deliberately and systematically to torture any creature capable of suffering, for any object whatsoever (except with his own consent for his own ultimate healing), I see no good reason why that doctor should not use that man for his scientific ends, or the ends of humanity, as the learned gentleman would doubtless express it. Worthless, indeed positively harmful as such a human being is to

his fellows, there must be some principle other than that of immediate utility, that is the real ground for exempting him from torture, if exempted he is to be. It is not his moral worth, for he has none; it is not his spiritual dignity, for he is spiritually degraded. What then is it, but his capacity for pain that stays our hand? And have animals no sense of pain, O disputer of my truism?

        Let us examine the nature of the vague unformulated claims to exemption from torture which a man possesses in the eyes of the majority of his fellows. He is a moral being? Perhaps, but what is that to the point? He is an intellectual being? Occasionally, but has that to do with the question? He has hopes of heaven, of a future life? Unproven, but grant it, and grant also what is also unproven, that animals can claim none of these attributes; again I ask, what is all this to the point? We are talking of physical torture, pure and simple, not of moral worth or intellectual endowments.*

        If a man can suffer, he is desperately concerned in the question of torture, whatever be his spiritual estate, and if an animal can suffer--? How is the conclusion to be evaded? Is not that poor, speechless, pleading, trusting creature at least as desperately concerned? And if we claim moral rank above that of the most degraded savages, how is it possible to defend the systematic infliction of anguish upon our dependents? Would that I could make the utter inconsequence of the ordinary reasoning on this subject as obvious to others as it seems to myself. It is a point of fundamental importance, and therefore I dwell upon it. I would clear away, if I could, all the weedy tangle of ideas that crowd round the essential question, as I would drag
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* ..."The question as to whether they" (i.e., animals) "are higher or lower than man is wholly irrelevant."--James Stanley Little.--"The question is not can they think--but can they suffer?JEREMY BENTHAM.

away the rough grass and moss from some precious inscription which one cannot read, because it has become covered with these irrelevant growths.

        After all, as soon as these confused ideas are dispersed, the matter becomes strangely simple.

        It is man's capacity to suffer that gives him a claim to human justice and mercy.* Who would want either, if he could never be hurt, physically or mentally? Does the stone shrink and ache if one kicks and cuts it?

        And does not this consideration give us an absolutely clear and rational principle by which the rights of men and of animals can be decided?

        If we torture an animal and a man, they both feel it. It may perhaps take rather more to make an animal feel a certain amount of pain than it takes to make a man feel that same amount (though this is not so universal or so well-established as people suppose), but obviously they both can suffer and suffer atrociously.+

        But now take the case of killing. Suppose we kill a man and an animal by the same process, and both instantaneously and painlessly. (This can be done, and animals might be killed without their knowing anything about it, in every town in the kingdom, if we would take the trouble to adopt Dr. Richardson's simple plan of a lethal chamber).‡

        Neither the man nor the animal suffers physical pain when he is killed in that instantaneous fashion. And the animal
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* "A good man will take care of his horses and dogs, not only while they are young, but when old and past service. We ought certainly not to treat living beings like shoes and household goods, which, when worn out with use, we throw away."--PLUTARCH.

suffers no mental pain, for on this lethal system he cannot know that his life is to be cut short. He simply goes to sleep and never wakes up. He had no far-reaching plans and hopes, no possibilities of development, or spiritual growth; none of those infinite and intricate ties and projects, those complex feelings and affections which bind a human being, even when miserable, to existence. Now the man man does suffer pain and injury in being forced to leave all this, to have his career cut short, his liberty taken from him, his possible development checked. Obviously, therefore, the killing of the man is a great, and indeed, an incalculable injury, while the killing of the animal cannot possibly be regarded in the same light, however much one might, on other grounds, disapprove of the action. For the death of the animal caused it no mental pain or loss and no physical suffering; it may even have saved it suffering, for the creature must have died sometime, probably in a manner less happy. Now although I believe that we are all making a terrible mistake in devouring animals, and that, in course of time, the human race will come to see its mistake and alter its habits, yet it seems the height of absurdity to place the killing and the torture of animals on the same level. We make the distinction clearly enough in the case of our own species, where, in fact, the distinction is far less marked. The object of ignoring the enormous difference where animals are in question, is, of course, to afford shelter for vivisection and for the torturing kinds of sport behind the ingrained practice of flesh-eating.

        If one desires to protect a cruelty, one need not go far to find the means. Man is easily convinced of what he wishes to believe.

        It has been urged that animals, after all, do not suffer very acutely, and that they are spared the horrors of anticipating their martyrdom. Let us hope that there is some slight mitigation to the awful anguish which they are called upon to endure; but alas! those who have studied animals closely are unanimous in asserting that the more they learn

about their nature and habits, the more appallingly like ourselves do they find them to be; and the more they become aware that terror and apprehension are among their keenest sufferings. It would be a relief indeed, knowing what I do of the way in which these gentle sensitive creatures are treated in physiological laboratories, if I could think they feel little, but alas, I am forced, against my will, to see in them beings who not only suffer physical anguish, but who hope and fear, love and hate, sorrow and enjoy, with astonishing keenness; each little mind and each poor little heart filled with sentiments and affections, strangely, cruelly like our own. The thought indeed is terrible, when we remember how we treat these fellow-creatures, but it cannot be honestly escaped. It must be because people do not observe or know animals that they can think of them--yes, and the most despised of them--otherwise than as little brothers, and if we only will, as little friends.* There is a book by Mrs. Brightwen, called "Wild Nature won by Kindness," that everyone would be the wiser for having read. The writer has been for many years an invalid, and she beguiled her hours of pain by making friends with the birds and wild creatures that live in her garden. The stories which she
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* "The researches of Lubbock in regard to ants, of Garner as concerning monkeys, have, with many cognate investigations into the habits and attributes of the lower animals, taught us something of modesty. We find that these creature approximate much more nearly to us than we had imagined; we find, too, that in no inconsiderable total of instances, animals possess particular attributes, moral and intellectual, which, judging them from our own arbitrary standpoint, transcend in excellence the collateral attributes in man.... It might be profitable to remind ourselves that because we hold the lower creation in bondage, we have made out no case for our superiority. In the history of nations, communities and individuals, it is far more ofter the lower that dominates the higher than vice-versa; those finer qualities and sensibilities which our moralists, philosophers and poets teach us are the highest attributes of man, are, as a rule, passports to suffering and subjection, rather than to happiness and dominance."--JAMES STANLEY LITTLE "The Gospel of Larger Love" (Library Review, Dec. 1892).

tells of these innumerable animals--of their astonishing intelligence, their devotion to her, their gratitude (one pet bird used to try to feed her with meal-worms as a proof of its affection), are wonderful, and will reveal to anyone who has not happened to have opened up this fascinating subject, what an exciting, emotional, dramatic world exists at our very doors, and how terribly we humans have abused the power that we have over these little creatures, who would be so ready to trust us if only we would stop our everlasting treachery and massacre and torture.*

        But this is a digression, though not really irrelevant, for I desired to point out that animals are, like ourselves, individuals, with individual characters and modes of feeling; and that they suffer through their affections as well as through their senses.+
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*
"Earth groans beneath the burden of a war
Waged with defenceless innocence, while he
Not satisfied to prey on all around,
Adds tenfold bitterness to death by pangs
Needless, and first torments ere he devours."
* * * * * *
"Ye, therefore, who love mercy, teach your sons
To love it too. The spring-time of our years
Is soon dishonoured and defiled in most
By budding ills, that ask a prudent hand
To check them. But alas! none sooner shoots
If unrestrained, into luxuriant growth,
Than cruelty, most dev'lish of them all.
Mercy to him that shows it, is the rule
And righteous limitation of its act,
By which Heav'n moves in pard'ning guilty man;
And he that shows none, being ripe in years,
And conscious of the outrage he commits,
Should seek it and not find it, in his turn,"--"THE TASK."--Cowper.

There is heart-rending terrible evidence, on this point. All life is one in nature, though infinite in variety. Our relation to the animals is a strangely close one, and indeed it is the very men who now demand sentient victims for their researches who have shown us how astonishingly close that relationship is. That animals suffer in anticipation has been proved again and again. I will quote one paragraph from an account given by Dr. Hoggan* of his early experience as an assistant in the laboratory of a great experimental physiologist.+ He says: "During three campaigns, amidst the horrors of way, I have witnessed many harsh sights, but I think the saddest sight I have ever witnessed was when the dogs were brought up from the cellar to the laboratory for sacrifice. Instead of appearing pleased with the change from darkness to light, they seemed seized with horror as soon as they smelt the air of the place, divining apparently their approaching fate. They would make friendly advances to each of the three or four persons present, and as far as eyes, ears and tail could make a mute appeal for mercy eloquent, they tried in vain."

        Dr. Charles Bell Taylor quotes this statement of Dr. Hoggan's in an address entitled, "Vivisection: is it justifiable?" and adds that Dr. Allix, the well-known French veterinary surgeon, has said: "I have known dogs die of sheer terror in anticipation of their doom before the vivisector had time to commence the operation."

        We have arrived then, thus far: that the claim of every living thing to exemption from torture for the good of others rests simply upon its power to suffer: not upon its name and
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* In a letter to the Morning Post, Feb. 2nd, 1875.

address, or the number of its legs, or the presence or absence of hair and feathers, of watch-chains or frock-coats, or Greek verbs or benevolent sentiments. On none of these virtues and graces does a rational claim to immunity from torture rest. They are entirely beside the question; and it is clear that if they are beside the question, the claim of animals is exactly as good or as bad as the claim of men. Either we let off the man because he can feel the pain, or we let him off because of the utterly inconsequent considerations enumerated above: for instance, his Greek verbs or his moral sentiments, or if you will, all the attributes that distinguish him from animals.* To exempt him on that score is about as intelligent as to exempt a man from taxation or capital punishment because his name is Brown, or because his brother likes cheese! It is incoherent, insane: and it could not possibly be adduced as an argument except by the strong against the weak.+ Indeed it closely resembles the reasoning of the cele-
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* In the muddleheadedness which allows us to grant exemptions and privileges on entirely irrelevant grounds, we resemble the Goths and Vandals in the early ages of European History. Guizot says of the Visigoth law (the best in all the Barbarian codes) that its punishments were surprisingly mild considering the brutal state of society: "for free men, that is to say, for whenever slaves or even labourers are in question, cruelty reappears .... the law abounds in tortures and in corporal punishments for them, but for freemen, Franks, and even Normans it is extremely moderate."--(GUIZOT. "The History of Civilization." Vol. I., page 15.)

brated wolf in the fable who sought reasons for devouring the lamb and was not very particular as to their quality.

        Further: we have seen that those intellectual and moral qualities through which man can suffer and be injured, in a manner peculiar to himself, form the foundation of a further set of distinctive human claims and rights. Just as the lowest insect has rights above those of a stone on the simple ground that it has feelings which the stone has not, so the man has claims above those of animals on the same simple ground: that he has feelings different from theirs. Where these differ his rights differ, but not by one hair's-breadth beyond. In other words: rights are co-extensive with the range of consciousness.

        There are many, I am glad to know, who would greatly extend this principle, which must be regarded as involving merely the barest justice from the human to the dumb creation, the pound of flesh, the simple bond, without one drop of blood. While fully admitting the difficulty, in this still savage community, of carrying into practice a principle involving a little more than bare justice, I still assert that there is this higher stage, to which the human race must some day attain if it is to develop morally. The day will surely dawn when man will overcome the savage in him so far as to hold that killing except in self-defence is unlawful: when he will live as the friend and brother instead of the enemy and destroyer of those who lie at his mercy. Granting that this is, for the present, extremely difficult or beyond average human nature, it is good and wholesome to hold it before us an ideal for the future. It ought at least to make us see how imperative is that lesser measure of bare just which, alas, we are still so far from having accorded to those luckless ones who have to find in us their Providence.*

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*
        It is encouraging to notice how often a happier future is foreshadowed and hinted at, in the writings of many of the finest of our writers and reformers. In the notes to this volume many great names have already been quoted. There are many more that might be added. Miss Cobbe gives an account, in her autobiography, of her last interview with Alfred Tennyson. He discoursed much on the hatefulness of scientific cruelty. "He said to me," Miss Cobbe adds, "'Good-bye. Fight the good fight! Go, fight the good fight!' I saw him no more; but I shall do his bidding, please God, to the end."

        Lord Shaftesbury was, of course, also well know as a hater of vivisection.

        The poet Robert Browning wrote to Miss Cobbe as follows: "You have heard I take an equal interest with yourself in the effort to suppress vivisection. I dare not so honour my wishes and prayers as to put them for a moment beside your noble acts; but this I know, I would rather submit to the worst of deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured on the pretence of sparing me a twinge or two.

        For the rest, I shall indeed rejoice if that abominable and stupid cruelty of pigeon-shooting is put a stop to. The other detestable practice vivisection, strikes root, I fear; but God bless whoever tugs at it."

        How many more centuries of misery and strife and avoidable anguish are to pass over this distracted globe, before men have learnt the apparently simple truth that cruelty and wrong do not lead to happiness and peace? How much dire experience will be necessary to convince us that our deeds and thoughts bear fruit after their own kind, and not after some entirely different kind, and that cruelty, be its purpose what it may, will not and cannot bring blessings and benefits to the race that practices it. The moral law is stern and just. It recognises none of the distinctions that we find so convenient. Cruelty is always cruelty, be its victim man or beast, and it bears the fruit of cruelty none the less surely because the sufferers lack power to protest or friends to defend them. The penalty, if sometimes apparently slow in coming, is certain and inevitable. It is as inevitable as that oxygen and hydrogen, when brought together in certain proportions under certain conditions unite to form water.

        It is not possible to commit a cruel action without its having some effect upon the mind and moral consciousness: neither is it possible for a cruel practice to be carried on systematically, and as an organized work, without its profoundly affecting the moral balance and condition, not only of those immediately involved, but of the consenting State and people

whose acquiescence has been bought by promises of profit for themselves. Surely we need no ghost come from the grave to tell us that the wages of cruelty is suffering and moral degeneration in some form or another, and that those who seek to hack and hew the secret of health and happiness out of living, agonizing beings, are but adding bitterness and anguish to the lot of man, tempting him to evil, obscuring the teachings of his conscience and preparing for him the agony that must some day overtake him, when at last his very misery forces him to realize what it is that he has done.*

        Some day assuredly man will recognize with amazement and shame the cowardice and savagery of his conduct towards those unoffending creatures, who ought to have found in his greater power and cleverness, their hope and their protection. It has been said that there is no moral suffering to equal that of remorse; and surely such an awakening to the nature of our deeds of cruelty--whether it be the active cruelty of commission or the passive cruelty of apathy and consent--must constitute, for the human mind, the condition which has been symbolized by the idea of Hell.

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* "What we do know is that the influence of any action, of any movement that is to say, must be eternal; and that moral laws are the most potent and dominant of all laws. And in this sense, since the moral law must have sway over all others, and because of all things beautiful, it is the most beautiful, we must glory in the fact that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, that those sins may burn themselves out in suffering; for it is by suffering alone that deviations from the laws of the higher charity can be effaced, and the condition of happiness attained."--JAMES STANLEY LITTLE.

CHAPTER III.

and their opponents are laughed at, as the party of "fad" and sentiment.

        Consider what a vast gap must be made in our code of ethics, in order to enable us to advocate vivisection, with a light heart.

        Is it not an elementary principle of morality, to leave unmolested, if not to actively protect the weak? Vivisection requires us to inflict upon them unutterable anguish. Is not the possession of power accompanied by the obligation not to abuse it:--and among the more generous of mankind, does it not prompt to a special effort to shield and minister to the defenceless? Yet the principle which justifies vivisection, urges us to select the most defenceless of all, not for especial protection, but--for torture! Surely there is some madness here!

        Whenever we find great cruelty, of the deliberate and cowardly and systematic kind, there is, in fact, always a sort of madness. The Emperor Nero was mad when had Christians covered with tar and set light to, in order that they might serve as slowly-burning torches at his drunken festivals:--the anguish of these victims of Imperial tyranny being provided in order to heighten the savage pleasure of its momentary favourites. When one learns, by the testimony of history, how drunken and insane the possession of absolute authority can make men not apparently bad at heart (Nero and Caligula began their careers as public benefactors), surely it behoves us to pause and examine our own conduct, in relation to the beings to whom we stand exactly as the tyrants of the Roman world stood to the helpless and despised of their subjects. Nay, our position is still more absolutely despotic, for men and women can, at least, cry out against their tyrants, and their sufferings may, at last, rouse their fellows to revolt and to revenge,* but
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*
        The following extracts from the Roman codes by which the conquered Provinces were governed will serve to recall the conditions of life at that epoch for countless millions, who have suffered and died without a sign--without raising a voice in protest; for their sense of wrong was probably crushed by the very awfulness of the wrong. It was not till long after the Roman Empire was broken up, that the Peasants began to revolt.

        CONDITION OF LABOURERS IN FRANCE.

        "We order that labourers be attached to the glebe in such a manner that they cannot be taken from it for a moment."--Code Justianian.

        "Let all fugitive labourers without any distinction of sex, function, or condition be forced by the governors of the provinces to return to the places where they were born."--Code Justinian.

        "If any labourer conceal himself or endeavour to leave the estate where he lives, let him be considered as having wished fraudulently to despoil his patron like a fugitive slave."--Code Justinian.

        This condition of things, gradually modifying in practice, continued in France till the time of Voltaire, whom it roused to furious indignation. In England, we had freed ourselves much sooner. Our revolts in speech and act were more frequent but less ferocious than those of the French. For centuries we enjoyed comparative freedom while our neighbours were either groaning under tyranny or engaged in sanguinary struggles for freedom. The awful ferocity of the Peasants' War, the Fronde and other risings of the oppressed, brought about a reaction of feeling against them, terrified the people themselves, and made them dread the horrors of civil war, even more than the miseries of their lot. The steady, independent, but just and kindly spirit of the English people was not theirs. They either submitted without protest, or they rose to rebellion and behaved like wild beasts, or rather like infuriated men. That is not the way to obtain liberty or rights, however terrible may be our wrongs. Mere revenge is futile. Savagery and cruelty, even when directed against the savage and the cruel, bring neither peace nor progress, and true liberty can never be won by savage wooing.

however shocking may be the abuse of our advantage, we have nothing to fear from the revenge of animals; they cannot so much as plead for mercy: they cannot contradict, though suffering the pains of Hell itself, when some calm physiologist tells a reverent world that their cries, and writhings, and shrieks are merely caused by a "reflex action," and indicate pain no more than when "the keys of a piano are struck."*

        It is high time that we realized our position in relation to our dependents, and the tremendous temptation to which we
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* Lauder Brunton

are exposed, to take unfair advantage of the opportunity, while basking in the happy conviction that, in the service of our noble selves, we can do no wrong!

        Like Nero, made with supreme power, believing ourselves gods and all the lesser creation ours to use and abuse, at pleasure, we may some day wake up to find that we--highly respectable and benevolent and well-conducted as we may think ourselves--have been, like Nero, in his insane egotism and self-love, infamous in our savagery and ridiculous in the self-adoration with which we seek to justify it.

        I do not apologise for speaking strongly, for I am not attacking individuals but a principle. Vivisectors are but carrying out the doctrine that the public has sanctioned. It is true that the public are absolutely ignorant of the nature of the practice which they have legalized, yet they have legalized it, and the responsibility lies, in great measure, with them. The education of our race has been such as to teach us all to see, in our power over animals, an invitation to use it in the pursuit of our own ends, irrespective of their torments. The vivisector accepts this universal view, and carries it to its logical conclusion. He is supposed to be working for the good of others, and so is held justified. Unfortunately, a habit of confused thinking makes people jump to the conclusion that a crime committed for others is not a crime, since the motive is unselfish: a doctrine that would obviously allow us to commit as many deeds of violence as we pleased--each for the other--so that we should all enjoy the spoil, and none of us bear the blame. This is, in fact, the sort of arrangement that some conscientious, but not very clear-headed people contemplate with regard to the vivisection question. If the vivisector tortures for the benefit of humanity, not for himself, we conclude that he is benevolent, and that we may sign the torture-warrant, with a clear conscience. The rabbit was not cut up, the dog was not baked to death for us--certainly not: it was for the Others! It is difficult to see how a highly conscientious people, with altruistic feelings, would get on without those convenient and much esteemed Others!

        The vivisector, indeed, caricatures the general attitude of the public, and reduces its principles to absurdity. Then he triumphantly appeals to those principles, and justifies his own actions by pointing to the lesser cruelties that are practised, every day, without a qualm. Out of a myriad wrongs we seek to make a right.

        With a virtuous horror of inconsistency, the Public feels that it really cannot deny the physiologist his victims. Does he not tell us they are absolutely necessary? And merciful Powers! supposing we had to bear the consequences of our own sins and follies! Supposing we had no hope of thrusting them on to the shoulders of the lower creation, which, after all, was made for our use? For goodness' sake, give the physiologist his victims, and let us hear no more of this painful subject!

        It is surprising what a large number of persons have come to the conclusion, that the human race really cannot manage to keep in decent health, without permitting animals to be cut up alive. It is especially surprising, since those who take this view are regarded as particularly enlightened, and one would therefore expect them to consult facts and figures very carefully, before deciding that all this torture has enabled, or is likely to enable mankind to resist disease and to live more healthily. One would expect them to remember that vivisection has been increasing simultaneously with our great improvements in ventilation, sanitation, water supply, and so forth; that our power of coping with disease, by these means, has vastly increased, and that therefore, if important discoveries can be claimed for vivisection, these discoveries have been afforded a splendid chance of producing their maximum of benefit, and of showing a vast improvement in the general state of the public health. They might even expect to get the credit of what is really due to the hygienically improved condition. Yet what are the facts? I quote from

Dr. Leffingwell, an American physician, whose articles were published in Scribner's Monthly and have since been republished.

        "I suppose," he says, "the opinion of the late Claude Bernard of Paris would be generally accepted as that of the highest scientific authority on the utility of vivisection in "practical medicine," but he tells me that it is hardly worth while to make the inquiry. "Without doubt," he confessed, "our hands are empty to day, although our mouths are full of legitimate promises for the future." Was Claude Bernard correct in this opinion as to the "empty hands"? If scientific evidence is worth anything, it points to the appalling conclusion that, notwithstanding all the researches of physiology, the chief forms of chronic disease exhibit to-day in England a greater fatality than thirty years ago. In the following table I have indicated the average annual mortality per million inhabitants, of certain diseases, first for the period of five years from 1850 to 1854, and secondly, for the period of twenty-five years later, from 1875 to 1879. The authority is beyond question: the facts are collected from the report to Parliament of the Registrar-general of England.     

AVERAGE ANNUAL RATE OF MORTALITY IN ENGLAND.

CAUSES OF DEATH, PER ONE MILLION INHABITANTS.

---

Page 54

Name of Disease.	During five years 1850-54	During five years 1875-79
Gout	12	25
Aneurism	16	32
Diabetes	23	41
Insanity	29	57
Syphilis	37	86
Epilepsy	105	119
Bright's Disease	32	182
Kidney Disease	94	114
Brain Disease	192	281
Liver Disease	215	291
Heart Disease	651	1,335
Cancer	302	492
Paralysis	440	501
Apoplexy	454	552
Tubercular Disease and Diseases of respiratory organs	6,424	6,668
Mortality from above diseases	9,026	10,994

        "What," asks Dr. Leffingwell, "are the effects here discernible of Bernard's experiments upon diabetes? of Brown-Séquard's upon epilepsy and paralysis? of Flint's and Pavy's upon diseases of the liver? of Ferrier's researches upon the functions of the brain? Let us appeal from the heated enthusiasm of the experimenter to the stern facts of the statistician. Why, so far from having obtained the least mastery over the malignant forces which seem forever to baffle and elude our art, they are actually gaining upon us: every one of these forms of disease is more fatal to-day in England than thirty years ago:"...

        "In 1879," adds Dr. Leffingwell, in a footnote, "the total mortality in England was above the age of twenty from all causes whatsoever, was 287,093. Of these deaths the number occasioned by the sixteen causes above named, was 191,706, or almost exactly two-thirds."

        The improvement which has taken place in the total death-rate has come chiefly from the lesser prevalence of zymotic diseases, which "no one to-day pretends to cure," says Dr. Leffingwell, "while the organic diseases show a constant tendency to increase." Nor must we forget, that this change for the worse has occurred in the teeth of our improved sanitary conditions.

        Now, startling as these facts are, I would not conclude from them alone that nothing has been gained by vivisectional research. It is dangerous to jump to that conclusion from these figures, without knowing all the circumstances and conditions of life, mental as well as physical, which marked those two epochs. Nothing is definitely proved against the

utility of vivisection, but the figures show (to put it mildly) that no very triumphant evidence of any great increase of power to cope with disease can be adduced by the advocates of the practice. If conditions had remained the same, then the case would have been clear against the usefulness of vivisection: but as it is undeniable that there have occurred great changes during these years, we are bound to admit that the changes may have been, on the whole (in spite of improved sanitation), sufficiently unfavourable to health, to overcome the good which, let us assume, vivisection has been able to achieve. But if that is the case, how appallingly evil must be the changes that have taken place in human conditions since 1850! Unless vivisection is useless or actually misleading, clearly those changes must have been disastrous in the extreme.

        We may observe here, that the practice of inoculation dates from about that epoch, and that year by year, the inoculating treatment tends to increase and to develop new "cures."

        There are now many persons who believe firmly that it is to this method of introducing, into the very blood, unhealthy organic matter, that we owe the increasing virulence of so many of our most terrible forms of blood-disease. Professor William Tebb has written a book in which he brings together a mass of remarkable evidence, tending to show that the recrudescence of leprosy all over the world and in this country, is traceable to vaccination.* The vivisectional school pins its faith to the method of inoculation, and it is to be feared that much blood-disease will thus be engrafted on the human race, even in the event of certain immediate cures being effected by the practice.

        It is, however, not my purpose to discuss the question of the utility of vivisection, or of the dangers of being misled by it, nor to lay further stress on the perils of inoculation. To the many who honestly believe that to prove vivisection useful to man is to prove it justifiable, I merely desire to suggest that it has by no means proved itself useful to man, in the long run, if such facts as I have quoted are to be taken into considera-
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* The Recrudescence of Leprosy, by Prof. William Tebb.

tion; and that, not only is its usefulness unproved, but it has been accused of being positively harmful and dangerous to the human race, not only morally (which seems to me self-evident) but also physically. It would take volumes to discuss the evidence on this point, and all I wish to attempt here, is to point out that no one ought to take the utility of vivisection for granted, without examining the evidence on both sides. It is perhaps scarcely possible, even then, for any non-professional person to come to a very definite conclusion. That there has never been any important gain in knowledge through vivisection is a large assertion, which would be extremely difficult to prove from outside, whatever be the truth. The question is rather: Has any important gain been made by vivisection that could not have been made in any other way?--;and even if that should be answered in the affirmative, we have still to ask (merely from the utility and non-moral point of view): "Has vivisection on the whole and in the long run enabled the human race to live healthier lives, and to be freer from the worst kinds of disease than formerly? We have seen what answer official statistics give to this question.

        If some special addition to technical be made, in one or two directions, at the cost of enormous labour, and time, and thought, which would otherwise have been given to post-mortem studies, or to gaining a wider medical experience and knowledge of human nature, can the race be said to have gained by the dedication of so many fine intelligences to vivisectional research? The vast amount of time and ability expended on the work ought surely to be taken into account, in balancing the advantages and disadvantages in this matter; and when we find a man of such brilliant attainments and unimpeachable authority, in his profession, as Professor Lawson Tait,* vigorously
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*
        "I do not believe that vivisection has helped the surgeon one bit, but I know that it has often led him astray."--Lawson Tait.

        Doubtless men of science would consider it audacious indeed if a lay person ventured to assert that at present science (at any rate physiological science) is shallow in its method and its spirit. Yet this, my conviction, I found the other day confirmed by Michelet.

        "The child disports himself, shatters, and destroys; he finds his happiness in undoing. And science, in its childhood, does the same. It cannot study unless it kills. The sole use which it makes of a living mind is, in the first place, to dissect it. None carry into scientific pursuits that tender reverence for life which Nature rewards by unveiling to us her mysteries."--Michelet.

opposing vivisection, not on the ground of its inhumanity, but on that of its uselessness and tendency to mislead, it behoves us to be cautious indeed, before allowing ourselves to be persuaded that vivisection has done real physical good to the race, in the least degree proportional to the sacrifice of time and talent made for it. Granted, for the moment, that such and such an operation, made possible by vivisection, saves a life here and there, how many lives are lost that might have been saved, and how many remain the victims of ailments that might have been cured, had the physiologist spent his time and ability in a less narrow field of study?

        A doctor so often fails, not from lack of actual technical knowledge, but from lack of insight; perhaps through inability to fully realize the power of mental states over the body, or from general absence of sympathy. And it is remarkable how few medical men there are, who seem to lay any real stress upon hygienic conditions. Yet, after all, it is these conditions that are really all-important in the preservation of health in the individual, and still more in the race; since, in the race, we find their cumulative results, in constitutional hereditary features and tendencies. Nevertheless, doctors order gallons of medicines, and sweep the heavens for causes and remedies that lie under their very noses! How much greater would be the debt of gratitude owing by man to his physicians, if only the latter would devote the talent and patience that is now bestowed on torturing animals to studying the laws and the art of life; to inducing men and women to live more

reasonably and healthily; to understand their own natures, to train themselves in self-control, to love fresh air and soap and water; to free themselves from slavish habits, and unwholesome ideas; to cultivate serenity: to gain a hold over their minds, so that they could minimize or overcome the tendency to worry, and learn to economize their vitality; to concentrate their forces when needed, and relax the strain when the moment came for rest:--in short, if the medical profession would only turn a little more of their attention to teaching us the real secrets of health and life, and enabling us to avoid disease, instead of only trying to discover (generally in vain), how to cure it--they would deserve the gratitude of their fellows for all time! And the result of their wisdom would very soon show itself in diminishing disease, diminishing crime, and a lowered death-rate. It is not necessary to point out what a vast amount of agony to the poor defenceless animals would thus be spared:--surely a matter of some importance even to the vivisector, who is always eager to assure us of his humane sentiments and of his horror of inflicting suffering. As for those who hold that torture for our own ends is cowardly and wrong, the abolition of vivisection would lift a dark cloud from the horizon of life, and make faith in human nature and in the upward progress of the race seem a little less ridiculous and Utopian.

        And now let us consider the consequences of making a glaring exception in our ethical code, in order to place animals outside the pale of human mercy. Let us consider the effect upon human sentiment and conduct of proclaiming, when animals are in question: "Evil, be thou my good: Wrong, be thou my right."

        I have already pointed out that the admission of these arbitrary exceptions against animals has led to the making of other arbitrary exceptions against human beings, when these were sufficiently helpless to make such action fairly safe. If one may suspend one's moral law in one case, it is

difficult to see why one may not suspend it in another, on the same plea: viz., the importance of the end to be gained. Now, if this principle of vicarious sacrifice (which is the principle on which vivisection justifies itself) is to become generally accepted among us, it is clear that security of individual rights and individual liberty is doomed. If a man may be subjected to injury and oppression, simply because his neighbours think they might be greatly benefited thereby, and he is powerless to resist them, what becomes of the freedom and rights for which so many of our ancestors have shed their blood, for which so many of our contemporaries are now struggling?* Is it not obvious that to attack these rights is to attack everything that is worth having in social life, and that tyranny and chaos of the worst and most savage kind would inevitably follow their destruction?

        What is it that constitutes the difference between the civilized and the savage community?+ Surely the protection afforded to the weak against the strong: the right to remain unmolested so long as no molestation of others be attempted. Take away these securities, resting upon the general consent
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* "... Burghers of the 12th century would have spilled their hearts' blood to have enjoyed with security some of the individual liberties which we do not even think, so much are we accustomed to them."--GUIZOT, "History of Civilization," p.402.

of the community, and what do we find? Neither more nor less than a state of savagery or of slavery.*

        In order to move further in the direction of civilization, and to retreat further from savagery, what must we do? Obviously we must protect more fully and more effectively the weak against the strong, right and liberty against force and violence, (whether force and violence be the result of actual muscle or of unjust social organisation): we must enlarge our circle of protection, so that no sufferer can be shut out, no cruelty or injustice be perpetrated merely because the victim happens to be defenceless. In a truly civilized state, no being capable of suffering would be defenceless: the whole people and their laws would be its defender.+ "Bend the twig humanewards and the world is safe," says some wise person.

        Now any practice that teaches men and women to think and feel in flat contradiction to these principles, must redirect their thoughts and instincts backwards towards savagery, and must make progress towards a higher civilization less possible. I cannot see how that is to be denied. Every word or act that helps to whet the barbarous impulses, which are still so easily roused in human nature, hinders human progress. And it is, surely, our savage, not our civilized impulses that are appealed to by the vivisector, who asks us to give him sentient creatures to torture, in order that we may
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* "Slaves have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as in England, for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which could never have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.""Principles of Morals and Legislation."--JEREMY BENTHAM.

gain something for ourselves thereby.* If he made the appeal to a race of savages, there would be nothing inconsistent in their acquiescence. Their theory is (roughly) that might is right, and that if a man is strong enough to do a deed, the deed is virtuous. They worship Force, in the person of their gods and idols, and their heroes are strong of muscle rather than tender of heart. Among such a community, vivisection would not be out of harmony with their philosophy. But the civilized hold that the very meaning of civilization and morality is a departure from those doctrines of might irrespective of right. Our moral code begins by flatly contradicting that savage theory, and our national religion professes to worship a God of Love, and to follow the teaching of one who said "Blessed are the merciful--."

        Therefore, when to us the vivisector says "Give us animals for torture for your sakes," we cannot rise up, with a light heart, as savages might do, and feel that we are carrying out our national morality and our national religion in replying: "Take what victims you desire, O physiologist, and win for us comfort from their misery."

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*
        "The fact is that man, though one person has two natures, a higher and a lower, and pity, like much else that is good in him, is according to the one and opposed to the other. It is therefore of paramount importance in the interests of the race that pity should be educated, fostered, protected, and strengthened, and the risk of its being impaired in the search for Knowledge, or with a view to relieve the aches and pains, or prolong the existence of men must be odious to every thoughtful person, who has learned by experience how hard it is to eschew evil and do good. Tamper with compassion, let it be set at naught under the protection of English Law, license men belonging to one of the most honourable of all professions to do despite to it, and thus make the whole nation a party to the crime, and one long step has been taken towards brutalizing the morals of the people."

        A race indifferent to cruelties has gone very far towards being cruel, and the history not merely of slaves of Nero but of the Reign of Terror in the last century, and of African tribes in this, show very clearly what comes of that.

--JOURNAL OF ZOOPHILY, Philadelphia, Pa. Aug. 1894. Vol.III, No. 8.

        So far from this, we are forced to throw over every sanction of the morality that we reverence, to deny our finer instincts, and every generous impulse, before we can acquiesce in their demand. In short, every sentiment that is kind, and true, and pitiful has to be arbitrarily put aside for the strange uses of this special pleading, and for the time being, we must deny the very root and ground-work of civilized existence. Of course, we resume our suspended sentiments, and reascend our moral pedestals, with unabated dignity, as soon as this troublesome subject can be thrust aside; but for the moment, the civilized has had to become savage, the pitiful to become ruthless, and it must be added, the intelligent to become muddle-headed.

        The very feelings that the vivisector himself would appeal to with all his eloquence, on any other occasion, must now be dried up at their source, and the kind and tender-hearted--like the beautiful fairies in the old legends, who turned, by a stroke of magic, into ugly old witches--suddenly grow unimaginative and selfish in relation to a luckless race of creatures, whose one crime is that they are not human, yet whose sole hope of mercy and justice lies in Man, their Demon-God!

        Alas! human conduct towards the animals seems to justify the pessimism of many a troubled soul, who fears that Man too has a Demon-God to rule over him, and that human life can never be anything but hopeless and tormented, since the power that rules is not beneficent, but vivisectional in spirit, treating us, its hapless victims, very much as we, in our turn, treat those over whom we exercise unlimited power. How indeed can we complain, if such be the order of the universe?

        I have, again and again, heard this very idea, but in a different form, used as an argument in favour of vivisection! All Nature, it is urged, is at strife and works by sacrifice: why should not man do likewise? There is no reason whatever, on the assumption that there is no such thing as a moral law: no such thing as right and wrong, nothing in Nature, either

actually or potentially, other than the mere law of strife and rapine. If what we call the moral element in man be a mere illusion, then the law of sacrifice (of others), is one which man might imitate with impunity.

        Only, let not those who bring forward this argument in favour of vivisection, shirk its application to their general scheme of life: let them clearly recognise all that the argument implies, and stick boldly to their colours. For, seeing that Nature works only by strife, and that man (by their own showing) ought not to attempt to be more pitiful than she is, mercy and sympathy are mere morbid excrescences, betraying decay of primitive force, as the growth of a fungus on a tree-root shows loss of vigour in the tree. In that case, moral laws are ridiculous, and all arguments founded on them are absurd. In that case, there is no good reason for abstaining from doing anything that we may have the power to do: and all social ordinances must be condemned which seek to override the crude law of Nature, and to allow peace and opportunity and happiness to be the lot of weak and strong alike, as far as human power can avail to rescue and redeem. All this (on the above assumption) is an attempt to run contrary to "Nature," and as such is futile and ridiculous. We must let Nature work out the destiny of her creatures by her own drastic methods. We must not intervene to save, and we must not attempt to spare any weaker creature for pity's sake, when we may gain something by tormenting that weakling. We have Nature's sanction for our ferocity. Of course our manners should be polite, and our conduct diplomatic when there is the slightest chance that the weakling has friends, or power of retaliation, direct or indirect. Towards such beings, and towards all the mighty, we must adopt rules of conduct, which, for convenience and elegance may be termed our "moral code": but as soon as we see that the code can be neglected without danger to ourselves, the superstition may be immediately discarded and the true rule of conduct be reverted to: Do unto others as you would very much object that they should do unto

you. We may proclaim ourselves Christians, at the same time, without hesitation, if we find it gratifying to belong to that esteemed body. We shall not find that anyone will call us inconsistent, although the precept may not be precisely in harmony with the teaching of the founder of the Christian faith. Only, we must be careful to be faultlessly ethical in creed and conduct (especially in creed) when we have to do with those who would make it unpleasant for us, if we neglected these simple precautions, and we may then be sure that all will go well with us, and that the Nature whom we worship, will select us for survival as extremely "fit."

        I do not here attempt to dispute the doctrine that what Nature does, man is justified in imitating. I only point out that if we really accept the doctrine, in order to excuse vivisection, we must not draw back and eat our own words when we find that it also excuses cruelty, tyranny and injustice towards all who are not strong enough to force us to carry out our moral professions.

        It is a significant fact,--which may be seen by the records of history and by our own conduct to-day--: that moral standards are always high in relation to the dominant and influential, that they gradually dwindle down in regard to the less powerful, and disappear altogether as soon as we reach the utterly defenceless. Now, those who may be numbered among the defenceless differ enormously, as to class and kind, in different epochs and in different countries; and if one could draw a chart on which a sinuous line was made to indicate these differences, the line would take most erratic and eccentric curves in passing from country to country, and from age to age. Beneath the line would be placed all those beings in relation to whom the human moral code becomes non-effective: just above the line would be ranged those who had some slight, uncertain hold upon the sentiment of their fellows: above this, again, would come those possessing definite though meagre rights, and so on up the scale, till we arrive at the full complement of rights, and the full sense of moral

responsibility on the part of mankind, towards this favoured class.

        In all ages, animals have been below this line, except now and then, when some great religion has won for them reverence and protection. At certain epochs, it may be said that slaves have been below the fatal line, for, as regards them, the general moral code has been null and void. What was a wrong to a free man was considered no wrong towards a slave. He might be beaten, killed, ill-treated in every possible way, and the conscience of the master, though a "good" man, was not disturbed. His moral code did not apply to his slave.* Serfs attached to the soil, bondmen, burghers, husbandmen, in early ages, and the very poor in all ages, will give examples of varying positions, below or above this imaginary line. For centuries, women were below the line, and in
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*
        In the earlier centuries of feudalism, the varying cogency of the moral code was expressed in the frankest manner, by the money fines which had to be paid for killing or injuring different members of the community; "But no distinction can be more unequivocal than that which was established between the two nations in the weregild, or composition for homicide. Capital punishment for murder was contrary to the spirit of the Franks, who, like most barbarous nations, would have thought the loss of one citizen ill repaired by that of another. The weregild was paid to the relations of the slain, according to a legal rate. This was fixed by the Salic law at six hundred solidi for an Antrustion of the king; at three hundred for a Roman conviva regis (meaning a man of sufficient rank to be admitted to the royal table); at two hundred for a common Frank; at one hundred for a Roman possessor of lands; and at forty-five for a tributary, or cultivator of another's property. In Burgundy, where religion and length of settlement had introduced different ideas, murder was punished with death. But other personal injuries were compensated, as among the Franks, by a fine, graduated accordingly to the rank and nation of the aggrieved party."--HALLAM, MIDDLE AGES.

        The following is an extract from the laws of the Anglo-Saxons. It was the law of the King of Wessex, Ini, who ruled over the West Saxons. It is rather startling to think that in Dorsetshire and Somersetshire in A.D. 690, the following was one of the laws of a king who made special efforts at establishing justice and stability in his realm. These are King Ini's own words (as translated by Mr. Benjamin Thorpe in the Ancient Laws and Institutes of the Anglo-Saxons.)

        Law of King Ini of Wessex, A.D. 690.

        "(Cap. II.) If anyone sell his own countryman, bond or free, though he be guilty, over sea, let him pay for him according, according to his 'wer'."

        Again,

        "(Cap. 39.) If any one go from his lord without leave, or steal himself away into another shire, and he be discovered, let him go where he was before, and pay to his lord 1x. shillings" (In those days a very large sum.)

    

A.D., about 920. Wessex. Edward.

• 1. The north people's king's gild is 30,000 thrymsas; 15,000 are for the wergild, and 15,000 for the cynedom. The wer belongs to the kindred and the cynebot to the people.
• 2. An archbishop's and an ætheling's (noble's) wergild is 15,000 thrymsas.
• 3. A bishop and ealdorman's, 8,000 thrymsas.
• 4. A hold's and a king's high reeve's 4,000 thrymsas.
• 5. A mass thegn's and a secular thegn's 2,000 thrymsas.
• 6. A ceorl's wergild is 266 thrymsas, that is 200 shillings by Mercian law ...

Stubbs. Select Charters Illustrative of English History.In the Burgundian Code, "there are .... three sorts of compositions. (1.) one for the noble Burgundian or Roman. (2.) another for the Burgundian or Roman of moderate condition (3.) the third for those who were of the inferior position in both nations.--MONTESQUIEU. ESPRIT DES LOIS. VOL. II., pp.10-15.

• Extracts from Buddhist Scriptures, some of them compiled before the Christian era.
• (2.) "The practice of religion involves, as a first principle, a loving, compassionate heart for all creatures."....
• (4.) "When first I undertook to obtain wisdom, then also I took on me to defend the weak. All living things of whatsoever sort call forth my compassion and pity."
• (5.) "How can a system requiring the infliction of misery on other beings be called a religious system? To seek a good by doing an evil is surely no safe plan."....
• (7.) "Causing destruction to living beings, killing and mutilating, ..... these are what defile a man."
• (8.) "Even so, of all things that have life, there is not one that the Buddhist anchorite passes over. He looks upon all with deep-felt love. This, verily, is the way to a state of union with Amitâbha." (The loving Father of all that lives.)

many countries, at the present day, they cannot, at best, be said to be more than just above it, since they may be imprisoned, bought and sold, and treated as property, without offence against the moral sentiment of their country; and even

in the freest communities, boasting a representative government, they are made to obey laws, and to pay taxes to which they have not given their assent.

        Human vivisection has been practised, in early centuries, on a large scale. The schools of Alexandria were famous for their vivisections; and what is more startling, in the later Middle Ages, in Florence, it was common for the Duke to encourage learning, by delivering over to the physiologists, for dissection while alive, unhappy wretches from the State prisons. Fallopius was celebrated for these researches. Of course, in every case, ancient, and modern, the victims are chosen from the defenceless class, and there is really no essential difference between our present practice with regard to vivisection, and the practice of the ancients, whom we imagine so much more barbarous than ourselves. In every case, we choose our victims from the class below the line. It is no thanks to our moral feeling that we do not choose them from the class securely above it, for we are unable to do that with safety.

        The fatal line, indeed, has fallen, so that now vast multitudes are above it, who would have been hopelessly below it, in times gone by. There are now fewer human beings whom it is safe and "allowable" to maltreat. Yet different groups of people hold very different positions in regard to it, to this day. The standard of conduct towards the white man and the black man still differs preposterously: and it is yet possible, as I have pointed out, to treat women as a class apart, to whom obligations and rights may be arbitrarily apportioned or withheld by the governing sex,--and this without any sense that a wrong is being done. It is in regard to women and to animals that we see the clearest and grossest survivals from pure savagery. But the line has risen sufficiently on the whole, to exempt human beings from being openly subjected to vivisection. Animals are now the only race completely below the line, in this respect. But there are still certain human beings defenceless enough to be subjected to this outrage, not exactly in secret, for the fact leaks out more or less, but without

official recognition. These people may, nevertheless, be said to be well above the line, for the sentiment of the public is not favourable to their being made the subjects of experiment: and they would be protected, if only they were not too poor, too ignorant, and too friendless to appeal to the general sentiment for redress.

        So that in civilised countries, at the present day, only the animals remain completely below the line; but they seem to be sinking even lower, to be pushed farther away from human mercy and protection, as the desire to further the interests of humanity increases. Our luckless dumb companions are doomed to suffer increasingly at the hands of man, who claims to be their moral superior, and proceeds to prove this superiority by torture and mutilation.

        Now, I would again point out that all this is perfectly right, and as it should be, if we are to accept the doctrine that because Nature is ruthless, man should also be "red in tooth and claw." We have seen how our moral codes become less and less cogent in proportion to the weakness of the class with whom we have to deal, till they cease to be operative altogether, in relation to perfect helplessness: but the significant fact ought not to dismay us, if we sincerely reverence this doctrine. On the instant, however, that we repudiate it; on the instant that we begin to hope that the human heart and human intellect have power to create or to develop, from an inner germ, an order of things whose law transcends that of brute force (as, for example, the laws of chemistry transcend those of mechanics, and the laws of biology transcend those of chemistry), then we have no longer any conceivable right to appeal to the example of mechanical Nature, as a justification for any human practice whatsoever.*

        To apply the laws of Nature to human conduct, in that
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* The extraordinary argument based on "Nature" partly arises from the very limited sense in which the term is used; "Nature" being made to stand merely for the natural forces in their simplest and lowest form, moral laws being ignored altogether, although also part of Nature.

sense, is about as absurd as it would be for the chemist to study his particular science on the lines of pure mechanics, or for the medical man to consider his patient simply in the light of an oxide, or a mere compound of nitrogen and carbon.

        Because a hurricane ravages and destroys, is a man justified in setting forth to devastate his neighbourhood? The "Nature" argument is surely palpably ridiculous. It is almost incredible that it should be necessary to point out that fallacy and confusion that results from adopting this patent, moveable, double-action reversible premiss, which may be shifted at pleasure--brought forward or suppressed according to the conclusion at which one desires to arrive, or the practices which one desires to justify. But this sort of logical legerdemain is performed by persons of majestic intellect, and it is to be feared, therefore, that the apparently self-evident fact does require pointing out. We have all grown so accustomed to making exceptions to the disadvantage of animals, that in our very philosophy, in our very theory of the universe, these ill-starred creatures are in question. They must be thrust out of all pales: the pale of religion, of philosophy, of morality; and we are not at all particular in what manner the expulsion is performed. For the entirely helpless there is no sanctuary. The human heart is closed against them: man will not extend his protection to beings who cannot share his high moral development. So he decides to resign himself to the "order of Nature" and to improve upon her a little (for systematic torture, even at her worst, she seldom indulges in); but, at the same time, he holds that a reverence for Humanity and a faith in the sacredness of the human soul (especially if unto the human soul have been added certain temporal advantages) must always actuate his conduct and temper his philosophy.

        So much for his philosophy!

        And now let us ask ourselves if life would be possible or

endurable on the "Nature" or the vivisectional theory, honestly believed in and acted on. Surely our whole attempt at civilization, imperfect though it may be, is a gigantic contradiction of the doctrine. There is not a quality of character, not an admirable deed, not a faith, not a philosophy, not a religion, not an art, but springs from an exactly opposite assumption, and certainly no step of human progress has ever been taken that was not in flagrant contradiction to the preposterous thesis.* Probably no one really believes it, yet how many of us are ready to profess it, in order to provide a convenient excuse for consigning the poor dumb beasts to a hell on earth, while we avoid, for our precious selves, even the discomfort of remorse!+ We drag up the old dummy-dogma--like some sainted corpse from its grave--and solemnly bow down, and make believe to be taken in by it. Nor do we shrink from the pompous farce, even though our very next words, on some other topic, proclaim a belief diametrically opposite to this false profession of faith, of which we have not even the grace to be ashamed! Sure it is time to call a truce to such fooling!

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* "Moreover it is the nature of intelligent beings to feel the imperfections of the laws of Nature."--MONTESQUIEU. ESPRIT DES LOIS. Vol. II., p.292

        Every hope that humanity can cherish, every grace and charm of life, every fine impulse, everything in heaven and earth that we call beautiful or good, springs from a source which we impiously deny, in asserting that humanity must take, for its guide of conduct, the laws of mere blind force.

        Who will seriously dispute that human happiness and progress comes, in the long run, not by suppressing the sympathetic sentiments, but by throwing open more widely the gates of mercy, by a more generous outstretching of the spirit? And it is not merely the heart, but the intellect which must expand, in order to make broader the circle of human charity. Truly, more often is the narrow intellect than the hard heart guilty of a cruel decree. It is not alone the sentiments but the imagination that must awake and enlarge, till not the humblest thing that suffers on this earth shall be beyond the pale of human justice and human tenderness.

        Can anyone really persuade himself that the path of progress lies exactly the other way? Does anyone really believe that our race must seek its redemption in torture, its health and happiness by the infliction of anguish unspeakable?

        If such be really the order of the universe, what is left for us but to "curse God and die?"

        But if such be not the true law of human life, what can be more clear and obvious than the path of salvation and of hope?

MONA CAIRD.

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