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Title: Great Testimony
against scientific cruelty
Author: Stephen Coleridge
Release Date: July 16, 2008 [eBook #26074]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT TESTIMONY***
Transcribed from the 1918 John Lane edition by David Price, email
[email protected]
[Picture: Presentation slip from the edition transcribed]
GREAT TESTIMONY
AGAINST SCIENTIFIC CRUELTY
:: COLLECTED AND EDUCED BY ::
THE HONBLE. STEPHEN COLERIDGE
WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXVIII
[Picture: Thomas Carlyle. From a drawing by Samuel Laurence in the
collection of John Lane]
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND
PREFACE
If the support of great and good men, famous throughout Christendom, will
avail to justify a cause, then indeed we who would utterly abolish the
torture of animals by vivisection can never be put out of countenance.
Difficult would it be indeed to bring together the authority of so many
resounding reputations against any other act of man, since slavery was
abolished.
The poets, philosophers, saints and seers of England have united to
anathematise it as an abomination, and as a deed only possible to a
craven.
It seems strange that in the face of such authentic condemnation the
horrid practice has not disappeared off the face of the civilised earth,
until it is observed that it has received the shameless support of
science, which for two generations has usurped an authority over conduct
for which it possesses no credentials. The modern prostration of mankind
before science is a vile idolatry. In the realm of ethics science is not
constructive but destructive. It exalts the Tree of Knowledge and
depresses the Tree of Life.
How is the character of man elevated or purified by all the maddening
inventions of science? How indeed! Are we made better men by being
whirled about the globe by machinery, by the increased opportunities for
limitless volubility, or by the ingenious devices for mutual destruction?
And how are we morally advantaged by the knowledge of the infinite depths
of space, the composition of the stars and the motions of the planets?
The old Persian, when his far-travelled offspring returned with these
wonders to tell, replied: "My son, thou sayest that one star spinneth
about another star; let it spin!"
And Ruskin once remarked: "Newton explained why an apple fell, but he
never thought of explaining the exactly correlative, but infinitely more
difficult question, how the apple got up there."
The dead and dreary law of gravitation made it fall, but the glorious law
of life, known only to God, drew it up out of the earth and hung it in
all its inexplicable wonder high in the air.
And I think herein is a very good parable applicable to ourselves and our
age.
Science has found out that everything in the Universe is falling towards
everything else, or trying to do so, and we are so absorbed in this
deciduous discovery that we have forgotten to look up and observe the
lovely things about us that by God's mercy have still escaped the
withering touch of scientific knowledge.
But Science has now moved beyond the comparatively innocuous accumulation
of mechanical discoveries, and advancing into the domain of morals, has
emerged in the sinister aspect of the defender of cruelty.
This may yet prove an usurpation that will lead to its ultimate
deposition and ignominy. A time is coming when mankind will have no ear
for the advocates of what all the great and good and wise have denounced
as wicked.
If Science comes before the world declaring that cruelty is necessary for
its advance, the world will one day tell Science that it can stop where
it is.
In the meanwhile that there can be no doubt in the mind of any man as to
how the greatest leaders of thought and loftiest teachers of conduct have
united in their condemnation of vivisection, I have thought it timely to
bring them together, a noble array, in this book.
CHAPTER I: THE SEVENTH EARL OF SHAFTESBURY, K.G.
FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY
[Picture: The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. From an engraving by W.
J. Edwards after Frederick Sandys]
The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury consecrated a long life, and dedicated a
great position to the service of the poor, the weak and the lost. His
life and work were one of the chief glories of the nineteenth century.
From early youth to venerable age his hand was outstretched to assuage
the miseries of the helpless and to deal a blow at cruelty and
selfishness wherever he discerned it.
By his efforts women were brought up out of coal mines where they dragged
trucks on all fours like brute beasts, by his protests little boys were
saved from being forced to climb up inside chimneys risking their young
lives and limbs that others might profit thereby.
He placed himself at the head of the fight against all cruelty to
children and became the first President of the Society to put it down,
which has now become great and powerful with officers in every town to
guard child life and protect the helpless little things from all manner
of nameless sufferings.
He championed the animal world and raised his voice against the
unspeakable doings of the vivisectors, and the whole anti-vivisection
movement was started and built up under his wise and benign guidance, as
first President of the Anti-Vivisection Society.
He belonged to the period when those who worked in the field of
philanthropy were almost exclusively concerned in curing, if they could,
the evils they perceived around them; but he himself was a pioneer of the
later school who aim also at preventing those evils. Those who went
before him sought to assist the poor and helpless, but while he
endeavoured to do this with all his heart, he also strove to destroy the
causes of pauperism. He perceived that physical squalor inevitably
produces spiritual squalor, and that if we are to make men think and live
cleanly we must enable them to possess decent and clean homes.
Others of his family in the past had served the State with credit in the
great public offices that satisfy men's reputable pride and honourable
ambition, but none before him had served his fellow creatures during a
long life with no other motive than to bind up their wounds and aggravate
the mercies of God.
His appearance when I had the happiness to know him intimately was noble
and memorable, and he won his way less by commanding abilities than by
weight of character. His large benignity repressed the expression of any
small or mean thought in his presence; and his arrival was sufficient
without his saying a word to elevate the tone and manner of any
discussion in which he was expected to participate. He was incapable of
asperity.
In the House of Lords there was conceded to him by universal courtesy a
special seat which he occupied independently of the change of parties, a
tribute of respect to his unique and distinguished position which as far
as I am aware has at any rate in recent years been paid to no one else.
He was a survival of the times when rank more recognised its duties and
received more homage than in the present day; for when I was young it was
still possible for the public to believe that peerages were only
conferred on men for serious and meritorious services to the country, and
that those who succeeded to them by inheritance were trained to recognise
the large obligations of their station.
He lived in a great house on the west side of Grosvenor Square, tempering
his august surroundings with a personal austerity. There he was easily
accessible to anyone who came to him for good counsel and not to waste
his own or his host's time.
Every cabman and costermonger in London knew him by sight and would take
off his cap to him if he saw him in the streets, and the poor in the East
End knew his tall figure and distinguished countenance better than did
the men in the club windows in the West.
The beautiful monument to his memory in Regent Circus records that he was
"an example to his order," and yet better than this stately panegyric is
the happy accident, if it be one, that the poor flower girls of London
have pitched their camp upon the steps, and have successfully defied all
the efforts of Mr. Bumble to remove them.
CHAPTER II: MISS FRANCES POWER COBBE
Miss Frances Power Cobbe was the original organiser and founder in
December, 1875, of the National Anti-Vivisection Society which until 1898
bore the Title of the Victoria Street Society for the protection of
animals from vivisection.
Many years before, in 1863, there lived at Florence a man who trafficked
in torture named Schiff; "among the inferior professors of medical
knowledge," says Dr. Johnson, "is a race of wretches, whose lives are
only varied by varieties of cruelty," and such an one was this miscreant.
Miss Cobbe was then resident at Florence and was the correspondent of the
_Daily News_, and in that paper she denounced the tortures inflicted on
animals by this dreadful man, which so affected her generous heart that
for the rest of her life her chief preoccupation became the desire to put
an end to such abominations.
In 1874 Miss Cobbe drew up a memorial to the Council of the Royal Society
for the prevention of cruelty to animals urging upon them "the immediate
adoption of such measures as may approve themselves to their judgment as
most suitable to promote the end in view, namely, the _restriction of
vivisection_." And with indefatigable zeal she collected the signatures
to it of a very large number of the most distinguished men in England;
among them were such names as those of Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson,
Robert Browning, John Morley, John Bright, Leslie Stephen, W. Lecky, B.
Jowett, John Ruskin, Dean Stanley, and Canon Liddon.
In view of the fierce advocacy of vivisection to which the present Lord
Knutsford has committed himself it is interesting to record that his
father Sir Henry Holland's name appears among the signatories of this
memorial.
The Council of the R.S.P.C.A. in 1875 displayed all the familiar
characteristics of the Council of to-day. On receiving this notable
memorial they adopted the device of promising to appoint a sub-committee
to consider the whole question of vivisection. Unlike the sub-committee
appointed in 1907 "to consider the whole question of sport" which never
sat, it seems that this sub-committee on vivisection really did sit once,
after which no more was heard of it.
Mr. Colam the Secretary was sent to call on the leading vivisectors to
ask them about their own proceedings; and the Council appear to have
imagined that, having asked the persons whose conduct was impugned what
they thought about that conduct, their function as representing the
Society entrusted with the protection of animals from cruelty was
fulfilled.
Miss Cobbe, like many of us to-day, really wanted cruelty to animals
stopped, and she was not likely to be satisfied with such a farcical
evasion, so she set to work and started the Victoria Street Society, and
to her above all others therefore belongs the undying fame and glory of
first raising aloft the standard of the imperishable cause for which that
Society exists and strives.
In that memorable year of 1875 the great Society in Jermyn Street,
misrepresented by a collection of somnolent inefficients, turned their
backs on tortured animals and stopped their ears to their cries of agony;
and all the subsequent years are strewn with opportunities abandoned and
duties neglected which one by one have been undertaken by fresh Societies
of earnest souls who would wait no more while the Council in Jermyn
Street slept; and that the record should be maintained intact we have
seen in the last three years the generous public subscribe an enormous
sum of money for the care and cure of our horses at the war, only to
discover that the Society is ready to acquiesce when those horses, that
are worn out in our service, are sold abroad to the highest bidders!
Miss Cobbe during her long combat against vivisection passed through
different phases of opinion as to the wisest parliamentary policy to
pursue. At one time she advocated restriction, at another total
abolition, and I will not here revive the domestic discussions and
differences that were the consequence of the diverse views entertained by
equally reputable and earnest workers in the cause. It is enough to
recognise and acclaim the fine courage and ability that Miss Cobbe
brought to the service of suffering animals, and the splendid edifice of
the National Anti-Vivisection Society that was built up from the ground
by her capable hands.
She suffered one cruel betrayal when she entrusted to another too ardent
controversialist the translation of some German account of a severe
vivisection, and discovered, after the publication of the description in
English, that her friend had suppressed in the translation the statement
in the original that anaesthetics had been employed.
The ferocious attacks made upon her on that occasion she bore with what
philosophy so exasperating a situation permitted.
Miss Cobbe was a remarkable person both in character and appearance, her
habiliments were quaint and practical, cut altogether shapelessly with
immense buttons symbolising the entire simplicity of her life and habits,
her hair was cut off short, and her whole aspect suggested cheerfulness,
robustness, and magnanimity. She was masterful in temperament, not
always ready to listen with urbanity to opinions she did not share, or to
admit that her conclusions could even conceivably have their foundations
in doubtful premises. But these very human characteristics in no way
diminished the personal affection she inspired in those among whom she
moved. She lived a fine courageous life, and when she died, by an
appropriate and beautiful coincidence, a dog was the only witness of her
last breath.
CHAPTER III: CARDINAL MANNING
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY
Cardinal Manning was among the early supporters of the Anti-Vivisection
movement, and was a Vice-President of the National Anti-Vivisection
Society till his death.
He occasionally attended meetings of the committee at my request to
assist the deliberations with his good counsel, and I remember one
occasion when Lord Shaftesbury came and took the chair, and both the
Cardinal and my father and the Bishop of Oxford were present to assist in
an important decision.
I frequently went to the Archbishop's house at Westminster to consult
him; the sumptuous cathedral and palace had not then been built, and the
house at the bottom of Carlisle Place had an air of cold austerity; there
were no carpets on the stone staircase, and the large room in which the
Cardinal received his visitors had nothing in it but a bare table and a
few cushionless chairs. He accepted invitations to dinner from my
father, but although he was gracious and courtly, he ate nothing, and it
was understood that no attention was to be drawn to this abstinence. He
cannot have eaten much anywhere, for he was extremely emaciated.
He did a great service both to the cause of anti-vivisection and to his
Church in 1882. It had been spread abroad, by whom, and on what
authority, I know not, that the Church of Rome had declined to support
those who desired to put down cruel experiments upon animals, and had
declared that animals might lawfully be treated like stocks and stones;
to this shocking suggestion the Cardinal gave a decisive and
authoritative denial at a meeting at Lord Shaftesbury's House on the 21st
of June.
His words were as follows:--
I know that an impression has been made that those whom I represent
look, if not with approbation, at least with great indulgence, on the
practice of vivisection. I grieve to say that abroad there are a
great many (whom I beg leave to say I do _not_ represent) who do
favour the practice; but this I do protest, that there is not a
religious instinct in nature, nor a religion of nature, nor is there
a word in revelation, either in the Old Testament or the New
Testament, nor is there to be found in the great theology which I do
represent, no, nor in any Act of the Church of which I am a member;
no, nor in the lives and utterances of any one of those great
servants of that Church who stand as examples, nor is there an
authoritative utterance anywhere to be found in favour of
vivisection.
And later in the same speech he said:--
I do not believe this to be the way that the All-wise and All-good
Maker of us all has ordained for the discovery of the Healing Art
which is one of His greatest gifts to man.
Two years later at a Meeting at Prince's Hall on the 26th of June, 1884,
with Lord Shaftesbury in the Chair, the Cardinal in a single pregnant
sentence dissipated the vivisectors' constant careless confusion of the
totally different moral acts of killing animals and torturing them.
"It is clear," he said, "that the words 'kill and eat,' and the dominion
which the beneficent Maker of all things has given to man over the lower
creatures, does not justify the infliction of exquisite torment in the
name of Science."
At that time Lord Shaftesbury was the greatest representative of the
Church of England and the Cardinal the acknowledged head of the Church of
Rome in this country and as they earnestly agreed in condemning the
practice of vivisection as wicked and abominable, it becomes impossible
for those who support it to bring to its defence any authorities on
conduct at all comparable with that of these two great and good men.
The Cardinal gave the impression of a consciously eminent
ecclesiastic, who was determined to lift his Church into greatness in
England by all lawful means in his power; his appearance was ascetic,
distinguished, and memorable; he was manifestly a man of direct
nobility of life, and most lofty purpose--a great statesman for his
Church, leading an austere and detached life as an example in every
detail for the faithful in his community--a prince of the Roman
Church fulfilling his august function conspicuously and faultlessly
in full view of a critical public. {16}
His care for the poor and the noble simplicity of his life found its most
eloquent evidence at his death in the discovery that his entire worldly
possessions amounted to sixty-eight pounds.
He had laid up his treasure where no rust and moth doth corrupt.
CHAPTER IV: ROBERT BROWNING
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY
DIED THE 12TH OF DECEMBER, 1889
[Picture: Robert Browning. From a painting by Samuel Laurence in the
collection of John Lane]
Towards the end of 1874, as I have already remarked, Miss Cobbe prepared
a petition to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
of which the chief paragraph ran as follows:--
It is earnestly urged by your memorialists that the great and
influential Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
may see fit to undertake the task (which appears strictly to fall
within its province) of placing suitable restrictions on this rapidly
increasing evil. The vast benefit to the cause of humanity which the
Society has in the past half century effected, would, in our humble
estimation, remain altogether one-sided and incomplete, if, while
brutal carters and ignorant costermongers are brought to punishment
for maltreating the animals under their charge, learned and refined
gentlemen should be left unquestioned to inflict far more exquisite
pain upon still more sensitive creatures; as if the mere allegation
of a scientific purpose removed them above all legal or moral
responsibility.
Miss Cobbe, confident of what Browning's reply would be, sent him this
petition and asked him to return it with his signature if he approved of
it.
His reply, which I believe has never as yet been published, redounds to
his immortal fame as a man of fortitude and humaneness.
This is what he wrote:
19, WARWICK CRESCENT, W.
_December_ 28_th_, '74.
DEAR MISS COBBE,
I return the petition, unsigned for the one good reason--that I have
just signed its fellow forwarded to me by Mr. Leslie Stephen.
You have heard "I take an equal interest with yourself in the effort
to suppress vivisection"; I dare not so honour my mere 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 the deaths, so far as
pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured on the pretence of
sparing me a twinge or two. I return the paper, because I shall be
probably shut up here for the next week or more, and prevented from
seeing my friends: whoever would refuse to sign would certainly not
be of the number.
Ever truly--and gratefully yours,
ROBERT BROWNING.
Five years later in the volume of Dramatic Idyls issued in 1879, Browning
published his poem entitled "Tray" which extols the noble heroism of the
dog and leaves nothing to be desired in its biting scorn of the
vivisectors:
"'Up he comes with the child, see tight
In mouth, alive too, clutched from quite
A depth of ten feet--twelve I bet!
Good dog! What off again? There's yet
Another child to save? All right!
"'How strange we saw no other fall!
It's instinct in the animal.
Good dog! But he's a long while under:
If he got drowned I should not wonder--
Strong current, that against the wall!
"'Here he comes, holds in mouth this time
--What may the thing be? Well, that's prime!
Now did you ever? Reason reigns
In man alone, since all Tray's pains
Have fished--the child's doll from the slime!'
"And so, amid the laughter gay,
Trotted my hero off,--old Tray,--
Till somebody, prerogatived
With reason, reasoned:--'Why he dived
His brain would show us, I should say.
"'John go and catch--or, if needs be
Purchase--that animal for me!
By vivisection, at expense
Of half an hour and eighteen pence
How brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see!'"
Here then is enough to show with what earnest conviction this poet of
powerful mind and pure life condemned the practice of vivisection. He
was a man who breasted the world with a cheerful philosophy which
permitted few external matters to disturb his habitual serenity. But
vivisection was one of them, and I have often heard him speak with fierce
detestation of what he called "the coward Science."
I do not think he ever addressed a public, or even private, meeting in
his life, and that may have left the unlettered world unaware of his deep
loathing of the cruelties of the laboratories; but he was one of the
earliest Englishmen of unquestioned distinction to join the
anti-vivisection movement and to accept the office of Vice-President of
our Society.
I venture to think that in aftertimes his sanguine advocacy in this great
cause will not be the least of his claims to the gratitude of his fellow
men.
CHAPTER V: LORD COLERIDGE
CHIEF JUSTICE OF ENGLAND
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL
ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY
[Picture: Lord Coleridge, Chief Justice of England]
I hope that my inclusion of my father in these articles on the first
supporters of the anti-vivisection movement will not be thought
unbecoming. I see no reason why I should not testify in these pages to
the unswerving adhesion he brought to the cause of humaneness both
towards men and women as well as towards animals, and the wise counsel he
afforded to the pioneers of the fight against vivisection.
It is perhaps now long forgotten that he initiated, drafted and carried
through the House of Commons when he sat in that assembly as member for
Exeter a Bill emancipating married women from the cruel conditions of
servitude whereby their own earnings could legally be taken from them by
their husbands.
This was the first of a series of wide-minded Acts of Parliament which
established the position of women as no longer the mere chattels of their
male relatives.
Cruelty to animals of any kind roused in him a deep and abiding anger: he
never allowed a bearing rein to be inflicted upon his horses either in
London or the country, nor was there ever a tied-up dog in his stables.
Lord Coleridge assisted in the efforts to get the Anti-Vivisection Bill
of 1876 passed without the wrecking amendments that were at the last
minute added to it; after the Bill was passed in its mutilated state Miss
Cobbe with a not unnatural impatience wrote to him and others saying that
"the supporters of vivisection having refused to accept a reasonable
compromise or to permit any line to be drawn between morally justifiable
painless experiments and those which are heinously cruel and involve the
torture of the most sensitive animals" she intended to endeavour to
induce the Society "to condemn the practice altogether as inseparably
bound up with criminal abuses"; and henceforth to adopt "the principle of
uncompromising hostility to vivisection," and she asked him to let her
know whether he would give his support to her proposals. His reply was
what might have been expected from one who could not permit his
irritation at the fate of the Bill to influence his parliamentary
attitude.
I am afraid [he wrote] my answer must be in a sense which you will
think unfavourable. I could not commit myself out of Parliament to
any view which I am not prepared to defend _in_ it. And the
unreasonableness and what I think wrongdoing of the Medical Men would
not justify me as a legislator in voting for what _I_ think wrong
merely in opposition to them or because I could not bring them to
terms which I think just and right.
I do not say that this is at all necessarily the rule for a person
out of Parliament, because so long as you do not agitate for what you
think _wrong_ it is perfectly fair to agitate for more than you
expect to get as a means of getting something of what you think
right. So that I find no fault whatever with any one who takes the
view you take; but my position is somewhat a peculiar one and I must
be cautious to an extent that some people may think coldness and
weakness. I am not afraid of your judgment however.
Six years later, in 1882, he wrote an article in the _Fortnightly Review_
in which he definitely though reluctantly gave his adhesion to total
abolition as the goal to be aimed at, but of course he never at any time
associated himself with the condemnation of all other measures for the
mitigation of the cruelties of the laboratory or of the world at large
that has since been pronounced by the more extreme protagonists on the
anti-vivisection side of the controversy.
This article dealt in a pungent severity with attacks made upon him in
the _Nineteenth Century_ by Sir James Paget, Professor Owen and Dr.
Wilks. As far as I know none of them rejoined. They had had enough!
But the last passage of the article is of a quality that I think my
readers will regard as fully justifying my reproducing it here,--I hope
it will receive their endorsement--the hand that wrote it has long been
still, but thirty-four years have not made one word of it less true or
less beautiful.
There is one authority, conclusive, no doubt, only to those who admit
it, conclusive only to those who believe that they can read it, to
which in conclusion I dare appeal. When a bishop in the Southern
States had been defending slavery, he was asked what he thought our
Lord would have said, what looks He who turned and looked upon St.
Peter would have cast upon a slave-mart in New Orleans, where husband
was torn from wife, child from parent, and beautiful girls, with
scarce a tinge of colour in them, were sold into prostitution. The
answer of the bishop is not known, but I will venture on a kindred
question. What would our Lord have said, what looks would He have
bent, upon a chamber filled with "the unoffending creatures which He
loves," dying under torture deliberately and intentionally inflicted?
or kept alive to endure further torment, in pursuit of knowledge?
Men must answer this question according to their consciences; and for
any man to make himself in such a matter a rule for any other would
be, I know, unspeakable presumption. But to anyone who recognises
the authority of our Lord, and who persuades himself that he sees
which way that authority inclines, the mind of Christ must be the
guide of life. "Shouldest thou not have had compassion upon these,
even as I had pity on thee?" So He seems to me to say, and I shall
act accordingly.
CHAPTER VI: JOHN RUSKIN
No one who has ever read a line of Ruskin could doubt on which side his
mind and heart would be ranged in the controversy over vivisection.
Here was a lord of language who was also one of the great moral teachers
of the world. To him the torture of a helpless animal for a scientific
purpose was a defiance of religion and an insult to God. Such pursuits
he declared "were all carried on in defiance of what had hitherto been
held to be compassion and pity, and of the great link which bound
together the whole of creation from its Maker to the lowest creature."
[Picture: John Ruskin. From a drawing by Samuel Laurence in the
collection of John Lane]
He occupied the illustrious post of Slade Professor of art at Oxford when
convocation voted to endow vivisection in the University and install Dr.
Burdon Sanderson, the smotherer of dogs, in a laboratory set up for him.
In vain did Ruskin protest against this horrible educational cancer being
grafted on to the happiness, peace, and light of gracious Oxford.
Convocation preferred the blight of the coward Science to the cultivation
of all that was beautiful, distinguished, humane, and brave; and they
reaped as they had sown, they kept the dog smotherer and lost the radiant
spirit and uplifting eloquence of the inspired seer. Ruskin resigned and
Oxford heard that voice of supreme nobility no more.
The Vice-Chancellor for very shame could not bring himself to read
Ruskin's letter of resignation to convocation. The editor of the
_University Gazette_ also had the effrontery to leave a letter from
Ruskin, giving the reasons for his resignation, unpublished; and the
_Pall Mall Gazette_ crowned the edifice of poltroonery by announcing that
he had resigned owing to his "advancing years."
Evil communications corrupt good manners, and association with
vivisection led these dignitaries and editors to flout and insult a man
whose shoe strings they were not worthy to tie. Time is merciful and
their very names are forgotten.
Ruskin had, a little time before these events, asked the University for a
grant to build a well-lighted room for the undergraduates apart from the
obscure and inconvenient Ruskin school; his request was instantly refused
on the plea that the University was in debt, yet in the very next year
this debt encumbered seat of learning and courtesy voted 10,000 pounds
for the erection of a laboratory for the vivisector and 2,000 pounds more
towards fitting it up and maintaining it,--for troughs and gags and cages
and the rest of the horrible paraphernalia.
This must I should imagine be the most squalid page in the history of
modern Oxford.
More than thirty years have passed since that University thus publicly
preferred a dog smootherer to one of the noblest of teachers and
saintliest of men.
Both are now long departed. The one can no more block up the wind-pipes
of living dogs and watch their dying convulsions, and the other can no
longer lead the minds of youths and maidens to seek and find beauty in
the visible world about them and recognise in it the hand of God--but the
world has known which of these men led the youth of Oxford to look up and
which to look down, and to-day a merciful oblivion covers the names and
doings of this triumphant vivisector and his valiant supporters, while to
the farthest inch of the English-speaking realms the writings of Ruskin
are treasured in a million homes and his name acclaimed with grateful
reverence.
_NOTE_.--This chapter on Ruskin having appeared as an article in _The
Animals' Defender and Zoophilist_ in March, 1917, and a copy of it having
been sent to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the
following correspondence ensued:--
CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD,
_March_ 3_rd_, 1917.
DEAR SIR,--I thank you for sending me the copy of _The Zoophilist_.
May I point out that it is not customary for the Vice-Chancellor to
read to Convocation the letters of Professors who resign, or to print
the letters in the Gazette?
Yours very truly,
T. B. STRONG.
HON. STEPHEN COLERIDGE.
SOUTH WALES CIRCUIT,
ASSIZE COURT, CARDIFF,
_March_ 6_th_, 1917.
DEAR SIR,--I have received your letter of the 3rd of March informing
me that it is not customary for the Vice-Chancellor to read to
Convocation the letters of professors who resign or to print such
letters in the University Gazette, but I do not understand from you
that the Vice-Chancellor is precluded by any rule of Convocation from
reading such a letter, or that the editor if there be one of the
University Gazette is unable by any rule of his office to admit such
a letter to his columns--and I therefore feel that I was quite
entitled to make the comments I did in _The Animals' Defender and
Zoophilist_. When such a man as Ruskin desired the reasons for his
resignation to be made clear, I take leave to think that the breach
of a custom that enabled the University to conceal those reasons and
even permit misapprehensions of those reasons to be given a wide
publicity, would have been better than its observance. And a
University Gazette that refuses to publish the letter of a
world-famous professor of that University, must arrogate to itself a
title to which it can justly make no claim.
Very truly yours,
STEPHEN COLERIDGE.
THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF CHRIST CHURCH, VICE-CHANCELLOR, OXFORD.
At this distance of time it is probable that the present Dean of Christ
Church may not fully realise the sort of person Professor Sanderson, whom
the University preferred to Ruskin, was: I therefore think he may like to
see a letter I wrote at the time to the papers which has fortunately been
preserved:
SIR,--I hope you will find room for an answer to the remarkable
letter of Professor Acland in your issue of the 9th, and to
"F.R.S.'s" attack on Miss Cobbe in that of the 10th of March.
Professor Acland says:--
"I have to say to English parents that everyone at home and abroad,
who knows anything of biological science in England, will think them
fortunate if their children being students of medicine, fall under
the elevating influence of Professor Sanderson's scientific and
personal character."
And "F.R.S." says:--
"I was a very constant attendant at Dr. Sanderson's private
laboratory during the last ten years of his professorship at
University College, and during the whole of that time I never
witnessed a single operation involving pain."
Now, are we not justified in estimating Professor Sanderson's
nobility of disposition by his books?
He was joint author and editor of the "Handbook for the Physiological
Laboratory," the publication in which of the tortures of animals
roused a feeling in the country that led to the appointment of the
Royal Commission to inquire into these practices. And is he not now
one of the editors of the _Journal of Physiology_, which continually
details to the world experiments involving terrible torments?
In his "Handbook of Physiology" we find such descriptions as the
following:--
Page 319. "(109).--_Asphyxia by complete Occlusion of the
Trachea_.--For this purpose a cannula must be fixed air-tight in the
trachea, the mouth of which is of such form that it can be plugged
with a cork. . . . The phenomena as they present themselves in the
dog. . . . _First minute_. Excessive respiratory movements in which
at first the expansive efforts of the thoracic muscles, afterwards
the expulsive efforts of the abdominal wall, are most violent.
Towards the close of the first minute the animal becomes convulsed.
_Second minute_. Early in the second minute the convulsions cease,
often suddenly; simultaneously with the cessation the expiratory
efforts become indistinguishable. The iris is now dilated to a rim;
the eye does not close when the cornea is touched, nor does the pupil
react to light; all reflex reaction to stimuli has ceased. All the
muscles except those of inspiration are flaccid, and the animal lies
in a state of tranquility which contrasts in the most striking way
with the storm which preceded it . . . _Third and fourth minute_. As
death approaches the thoracic and abdominal movements which are
entirely respiratory become slow and slower as well as shallower. . . .
In the spasms which accompany the final gasps of an asphyxiated
animal the head is thrown back, the trunk straightening or arched
backwards, and the limbs are extended while the mouth gapes and the
nostrils dilate. They are called by physiologists stretching
convulsions."
Page 320. "(110).--_Asphyxia by Slow Suffocation_.--When an animal
is allowed to breathe the same quantity of air repeatedly and
continuously out of a bag, the process being of much longer duration,
the phenomena can be studied with greater facility."
After this, is it "ill-natured or ill-mannered" to think that parents
will _not_ be fortunate if "their children fall under the elevating
influence of Dr. Sanderson's scientific and personal character"?
We want to know how medicine is advanced by the agonies of these
suffocated animals?
It may be true that Professor Sanderson at present holds no
certificate, nor does Dr. Michael Foster, who occupies a similar
position at Cambridge, but Dr. Michael Foster has "assistants" who
hold from time to time certificates, and quite lately, "under his
guidance," a lady, Miss Emily Nunn, has been poisoning frogs till
their skin comes off. There is nothing to prevent Professor
Sanderson from employing assistants. The mind may be the mind of
Professor Sanderson, but the knife may be the knife of such a man as
Dr. Klein, who was his former assistant at the Brown Institution, and
who has publicly declared that "he has no regard at all for the
sufferings of the animals."
Your obedient servant,
STEPHEN COLERIDGE.
12 OVINGTON GARDENS, LONDON,
_March_ 13_th_, 1885.
On the publication of this letter the Dean of Christ Church of that day,
Dean Liddell, wrote to me a long rambling letter which I could not then,
and cannot now, publish because it concludes with these words:--
I have written this not for publication. I will not engage in
newspaper controversy. I write to you, out of respect for the name
you bear,--not in anger but in sorrow.
To this I replied:
To my letter in the Press you have no word to offer. In it I quote
verbatim Professor Sanderson's own description of one of the many
wanton torments that he has inflicted upon the good creatures of God.
I ask how medicine is advanced by the agonies of the dogs he has
slowly suffocated, and I get no answer (though I have sent the letter
to him and some twenty other vivisectors) but this expression from
you of sorrow that the name I bear should be ranged on the side of
this man's opponents.
Sir, I am a young man, unskilled in polemics and unpractised in the
art of advocacy, no match for one of mature age, ripe experience, and
stored learning; but if an enthusiasm for mercy, a belief that human
life itself is not fitly bought by the torturing of the helpless, an
amazement that any Christian, nay that any man should call one of
these tormentors "friend," be sentiments the holding of which by one
of my name fills you with sorrow if not with anger, it without doubt
is plain that our name is but a name to you, and that your respect
for it should have been withdrawn when it first came into prominence.
I do not believe you know what things these men have done; it is a
terrible task for any man to read their literature; if you had done
so I do indeed believe that not your sorrow only but your anger would
be deeply roused, but--not against me.
I remain, Sir,
Faithfully and Respectfully yours,
STEPHEN COLERIDGE.
It gives me peculiar pleasure to bring up this letter from the now
distant past; thirty-two years have not made me wish to withdraw or
change a word of it.
CHAPTER VII: DR. JOHNSON
Of all the Masters of letters that have adorned and elevated the speech
of our race Dr. Johnson is in many ways the most lovable. The son of a
poor bookseller in Lichfield {40} with an uncouth figure and an
undistinguished countenance, he rose by the massive force of his
character and the tireless persistence of his industry to an unchallenged
supremacy in the literary world of his age, displaying in his whole life
the truth of his own dictum that "few things are impossible to diligence
and skill." Disdaining the common habit of the times he would owe
nothing to the patronage of the great. "Is not a patron," he wrote to
Lord Chesterfield, "one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for
life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with
help?"
[Picture: Dr. Johnson. From a contemporary etching published February
10th, 1780]
He was not very patient with the stupid, or merciful to the absurd, and
vanity never came into his presence without receiving swift and mortal
blows; but the chastisement of his caustic tongue never fell upon modest
worth, and there never lived a man who was a more faithful and
affectionate friend.
The style of his writing is always balanced and sonorous, and everywhere
and always is he "the friend of the wise and teacher of the good."
No man was more ready to give forcible expression to his amusing
prejudices, as when he exclaimed that "the noblest prospect which a
Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England," but to
be able to assert of any act of man that Dr. Johnson in solemn
seriousness condemned it, is for ever to arraign that act in the court of
human morals; and so the judicious must concede that when his authority
can be cited in fierce and glowing denunciation of vivisectors they are
left in a demersed condition.
I took occasion when giving evidence before the last Royal Commission on
Vivisection to rehearse Dr. Johnson's philippic which I now reproduce
below, and the dejected and deflated aspect of the vivisectors on the
commission when I had finished it caused that moment to be one of those I
shall always recall with exhilaration! Not a word had one of them to say
while I waited for any comment they might adventure, and after a
diverting and eloquent silence Lord Selby from the chair remarked, "That
leaves no doubt about Dr. Johnson's view in his day." It most certainly
does not!
The _Idlers_ that sport only with inanimate nature may claim some
indulgence; if they are useless, they are still innocent; but there
are others, whom I know not how to mention without more emotion than
my love of quiet willingly admits. Among the inferior professors of
medical knowledge is a race of wretches whose lives are only varied
by varieties of cruelty; whose favourite amusement is to nail dogs to
tables and open them alive; to try how long life may be continued in
various degrees of mutilation, or with the excision or laceration of
the vital parts; to examine whether burning irons are felt more
acutely by the bone or tendon; and whether the more lasting agonies
are produced by poison forced into the mouth, or injected into the
veins, it is not without reluctance that I offend the sensibility of
the tender mind with images like these. If such cruelties were not
practised it were to be desired that they should not be conceived;
but, since they are published every day with ostentation, let me be
allowed once to mention them, since I mention them with abhorrence.
_Mead_ has invidiously remarked of _Woodward_ that he gathered shells
and stones, and would pass for a philosopher. With pretentions much
less reasonable the anatomical novice tears out the living bowels of
an animal and styles himself physician, prepares himself by familiar
cruelty for that profession which he is to exercise upon the tender
and the helpless, upon feeble bodies and broken minds, and by which
he has opportunities to extend his arts and torture, and continue
those experiments upon infancy and age, which he has hitherto tried
upon cats and dogs. What is alleged in defence of these hateful
practices everyone knows, but the truth is that by knives, fire, and
poisons, knowledge is not always sought, and is very seldom attained.
I know not that by living dissections any discovery has been made by
which a single malady is more easily cured. And if the knowledge of
physiology has been somewhat increased, he surely buys knowledge dear
who learns the use of the lacteals at the expense of his own
humanity. It is time that a universal resentment should arise
against those horrid operations, which tend to harden the heart and
make the physician more dreadful than the gout or the stone.
CHAPTER VIII: THOMAS CARLYLE
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY
The world of letters and of ethics has hardly yet settled whether much of
the teaching of the Sage of Chelsea should be the subject of praise or
blame.
In the advocacy of fine principles of conduct set forth for us in
language of surpassing eloquence and earnest conviction in many a page of
"Sartor Resartus," and scattered through innumerable pamphlets, Carlyle
commands the fervent adhesion of the honest, the brave, and the good;
while in other parts of his writings his infatuated admiration of force,
however clothed with brutality, and of strength, however marred with
mendacity, are calculated as deeply to alienate the urbane man of the
world as the austere Christian.
And this confusion in the estimate of Carlyle and of his teaching suffers
an aggravation from the manifest malice of the biography of him
perpetrated by his friend James Anthony Froude. A man who is entrusted
with the task of writing the life of a great man who was also his friend
need not adopt the language of continuous panegyric, but to throw a
brilliant illumination upon the man's smaller domestic rugosities which
even the weakest charity would conceal and the feeblest generosity would
forget is a singularly spiteful betrayal.
When something was said to Carlyle about the likelihood of the Dean of
Westminster recognising his fame as justifying his interment in the
Abbey, the rugged old man exclaimed, "Deliver me from that
body-snatcher." It would have been more to the purpose if he had been
delivered from his intimate friend as his biographer!
That Carlyle detested vivisection, however, must ever remain a great
tribute both to him and to our cause. Many circumstances of the man and
his teaching might have led the world to anticipate that he would very
likely be found indifferent on the subject. His earnest adhesion to our
principles leaves those who politely call us old women of both sexes in a
foolish case, for nothing could be more divertingly absurd than so to
classify Carlyle.
I think Froude forgot to mention Carlyle's stern condemnation of
vivisection in his biography, which is more remarkable inasmuch as Froude
himself was a firm and outspoken supporter of our cause.
Whether we can faithfully take to heart and follow all the teaching of
this "old Man eloquent" will long remain a subject of debate, but no one
can rise from his works without recognising a moral grandeur in him that
far out-tops the very human flaws that may even serve to make him more
penetrative to our own imperfect hearts.
There seems to be a law that compels all the truly great men of letters,
from Shakespeare and Johnson down to our own day, to abhor the torture of
animals for our supposed benefit, and to that law Thomas Carlyle starkly
adhered.
CHAPTER IX: TENNYSON
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY
[Picture: Tennyson. From an unpublished photograph in the possession of
Charles Bruce Locker Tennyson, C. M. G.]
Tennyson, as was inevitable with a man of such nobility of mind and life,
regarded the torture of animals for the sake of knowledge with "the hate
of hate, the scorn of scorn."
If authority be cited in great moral questions here is one that must
compel reverence from all but the poor trifler with his "hollow smile and
frozen sneer."
He looked modern Science in the eye, perceived whither its aggrandisement
of knowledge to a place supreme in human estimate, above conduct, must
inevitably lead mankind, and proclaimed, in accents which can never die,
that it is impossible for man to acquiesce in a godless world.
He taught us that men's hearts can never be satisfied with a world
explained and comprised by the cold "changeless law" of foreordained
evolution and inevitable destiny. "Knowledge comes," said he, "but
wisdom lingers."
From the first, then, Tennyson lent the weight of his splendid name to
the cause of mercy, and I find his signature to the original great
petition for the restriction of vivisection between those of Leslie
Stephen and Robert Browning on the same sheet of paper--a sheet of paper
now one of the treasured possessions of the National Anti-Vivisection
Society.
All the world knows the allusions in his works to those who "carve the
living hound," and to curare, which he called "the hellish oorali." And
thus this greatest poet of the Victorian age gave the weight of his
commanding authority for all time to a fierce condemnation of vivisection
as the most awful and monstrous of the offsprings of modern Science.
Tennyson was religious in the widest and most inspiring sense.
"Almost the finest summing up of religion," he wrote, "is 'to do justice,
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.'"
"To love mercy!" That is the true sign of magnanimity in man. All holy
men, all brave men, all great and knightly men have loved mercy. "It is
an attribute to God Himself."
Time passes, and succeeding races of mankind, like the leaves of autumn,
are blown away and perish, but countless men of heroic mould, reaching
back into the dim mists of legend and down through innumerable years
while the great world spins "for ever down the ringing grooves of
change," have one and all been gloriously crowned with the same shining
diadem of mercy.
CHAPTER X: CARDINAL NEWMAN
[Picture: Cardinal Newman. From the portrait by Jane Fortescue, Lady
Coleridge]
It is difficult perhaps for students of the younger generation to realise
the immense influence exercised among his contemporaries by Cardinal
Newman, nor will a study of his writings adequately explain it to them.
He has hardly survived as a standard author, though he wrote a pure and
lucid prose. Those who leave the bulk of their literary work behind them
in the form of sermons are inviting the world to neglect it.
Moreover, though he was a past master of controversy, the arena in which
he fought with such doughty prowess amid the excited plaudits and
dehortations of vast assemblies is now left solitary in echoing
emptiness, and the crowds of to-day have passed away to abet the
combatants, on one side or the other, in very different fields of
tourney.
Here and there his writing ascends to a fine note of eloquence, as in his
great exclamatory passage on music that begins thus:--
There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen: yet what a
slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so
much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great
master in it create his new world!
But all his writings, religious and controversial, will not explain the
immense and dominating effect Newman produced upon his contemporaries.
That effect was due to the irresistible magic of his personality. He was
manifestly one of the Saints of God, and his presence brought with it
into any company a sense of mighty power gloved in stainless humility.
Though habitually bearing an aspect of wistful gentleness, his entry into
a room crowded with distinguished people made them all seem to be
something less than they were before his arrival.
A man of such a character commands by his visible presence, and those who
have not felt the spell of it do not comprehend the cause of his
authoritative influence among those who have.
The teaching of Newman on the great question of man's relation to the
sentient creatures placed in his power in the world, must come to us with
all the weight that is implicit in the utterance of one of such
unquestioned sanctity.
It would be difficult in all his voluminous works to discover anything
more touching and moving than his reference to the sufferings of animals,
who as he says "have done no harm," which is embedded in the seventh
volume of his Parochial and Plain Sermons:--
First, as to these sufferings, you will observe that our Lord is
called a Lamb in the text; that is, He was as defenceless and as
innocent as a lamb is. Since then Scripture compares Him to this
inoffensive and unprotected animal, we may, without presumption or
irreverence, take the image as a means of conveying to our minds
those feelings which our Lord's sufferings should excite in us. I
mean, consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which
sometimes meet us of cruelties exercised on brute animals. Does it
not sometimes make us shudder to hear tell of them, or to read them
in some chance publication which we take up? At one time it is the
wanton deed of barbarous and angry owners who ill-treat their cattle,
or beasts of burden; and at another it is the cold-blooded and
calculating act of men of science, who make experiments on brute
animals, perhaps merely from a sort of curiosity.
I do not like to go into particulars, for many reasons, but one of
those instances which we read of as happening in this day, and which
seems more shocking than the rest, is when the poor dumb victim is
fastened against a wall, pierced, gashed, and so left to linger out
its life. Now, do you not see that I have a reason for saying this,
and am not using these distressing words for nothing? For what was
this but the very cruelty inflicted upon our Lord? He was gashed
with the scourge, pierced through hands and feet, and so fastened to
the Cross, and there left, and that as a spectacle. Now, what is it
moves our very hearts and sickens us so much as cruelty shown to poor
brutes? I suppose this first, that they have done no harm; next,
that they have no power whatever of resistance; it is the cowardice
and tyranny of which they are the victims which make their sufferings
so especially touching. For instance, if they were dangerous
animals, take the case of wild beasts at large, able not only to
defend themselves, but even to attack us; much as we might dislike to
hear of their wounds and agony, yet our feelings would be of a very
different kind, but there is something so very dreadful, so satanic
in tormenting those who never have harmed us, and who cannot defend
themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of
offence nor defence, that none but very hardened persons can endure
the thought of it.
Let us listen with all our hearts to this beautiful appeal. Let us
reverence the saintly man who made it, and who still speaks to us out of
the past. Let us remember that Knowledge and the search for it may often
be cruel, but that Wisdom and those who follow it are always merciful.
CHAPTER XI: THREE GREAT CHURCHMEN
I have already recorded in these pages the strenuous opposition to
vivisection displayed by the two greatest representatives of the Church
of Rome that arose in England in the last century; and to all who adhere
to that Church the authority of the two illustrious Cardinals Newman and
Manning must be decisive.
The most famous dignitaries of the English Church in the great Victorian
age were also as firm in their condemnation of vivisection as were the
great Cardinals.
When I was a young man Dean Stanley was the Dean of Westminster, Dean
Vaughan was the Master of the Temple, and Liddon Canon of St. Paul's.
These were all men of world-wide distinction. They were men who adorned
and made splendid the offices and dignities they occupied, their names
were familiar in every corner of the land, they lent a lustre to the
Church of England, and each of them utterly condemned vivisection.
In these present times only a few people in the metropolis, and hardly
anybody out of it, can tell without consulting some book of reference who
may be the estimable persons who to-day fill the Deanery of Westminster
and the Mastership of the Temple, nor has Canon Liddon any successor that
the world acclaims, and I can vouch for it that none of them has ever
extended to us a helping hand or publicly condemned the torture of
animals for scientific purposes.
It is always the loftiest names in literature and the most illustrious
authorities on ethics that are found ranged against the infliction of
suffering upon helpless animals for the enlargement of human knowledge.
Those who support such inflictions are never in the first rank of
literature, art, or moral teaching. Dean Stanley left behind him a
reputation incomparably greater than any occupier of his Deanery that has
succeeded him. The same must be conceded to Dean Vaughan at the Temple;
and the eloquence of Canon Liddon compelled the absorbed attention of
such congregations as are not now collected by the Canons that have
followed him. As far as I am aware, none of the successors of these
great men have ever helped our cause at all.
No doubt whenever there shall arise in the ministry of the Church of
England men of the commanding power, distinguished character, and potent
speech that these great men of the last generation displayed we shall
find them also espousing the cause of the helpless vivisected animals; in
the meanwhile the occupiers of the most dignified positions in the
Established Church seem to have drifted into the somewhat ignoble
attitude of avoiding the disagreeable subject of vivisection altogether.
When we invite them to help us we receive either no reply at all, or a
reply that is carefully evasive, or we are damned with faint praise while
assured that the writer is too busy to give the subject the attention it
needs before any public utterance is possible upon it. All of which
methods of dealing with the matter display much wisdom of the world and a
very human desire to avoid controversy and other uncomfortable mental and
epistolary disturbance, but none of the spirit that led Archbishop Temple
when he was Bishop of Exeter to stand unflinching on a temperance
platform while the publicans pelted him with flour.
CHAPTER XII: QUEEN VICTORIA
Queen Victoria has given her name to a period which has no parallel in
magnificence since the days of the great Elizabeth.
The galaxy of great poets, teachers, and philosophers that flourished in
the Victorian age cannot be matched in any similar series of years in all
the history of the modern world.
With her departure exhaustion seems to have come upon the world of
letters for a time, and to the classic glories of the nineteenth century
there has succeeded an usurpation of journalists without the splendour of
genius or even the distinction of scholarship.
And although we may perhaps recognise in Lord Beaconsfield's inclusive
use of the phrase to her of "we authors, Madam" something of the flattery
of the courtier, yet assuredly in all her public addresses to her people
there is displayed a fine and biblical simplicity, and a directness of
appeal indicative of a noble mind and a great heart.
The most penetrating criticism will fail to discover a fault either of
taste or diction or intent in any of these utterances. They combine the
dignity appropriate to the words of the greatest Sovereign of the World,
with the intimate friendliness that proceeds from the wellsprings of a
sweet woman's heart.
Worthily then did she reign over the most splendid times of our history.
That she should from the day she ascended the throne to the day of her
death forward and abet all the enlargements of the spirit of mercy and
pity towards the suffering, whether among man or animals, was inevitable
in a nature so benevolent. And it may very well be that in far distant
times the rise of humaneness to man and beast will be regarded as one of
the noblest characteristics of her reign.
Her position above controversies precluded her from participating in
them, and made it difficult if not impossible for her publicly to espouse
the cause of the miserable creatures subjected to nameless sufferings in
the laboratories of the scientific. But her sympathy with those who
strove and still strive to end those sufferings could not always be
concealed, and on a memorable occasion she expressed her concurrence in
the efforts of those who desired to see the laws sanctioning such
suffering totally abolished and repealed.
Very fitting therefore it is that among those who earnestly condemned
vivisection we should include the august name and fame of Queen Victoria.
CHAPTER XIII: COMPASSED ABOUT WITH SO GREAT A CLOUD OF WITNESSES
Among the eminent men and women of England whose names are not to be
regarded as world famous in the sense that applies to those dealt with in
the foregoing chapters, but who nevertheless in their place and time were
recognised by their contemporaries and are still recognised by those now
living as persons of authority and ability, there can be cited a
distinguished array who consistently condemned vivisection as permitted
and as practised in this country as immoral. Among religious leaders may
be enumerated the following:--
Archbishop McEvilly, of Tuam; Archbishop Crozier, Primate of Ireland;
Archbishop Bagshawe; Bishop Westcott, of Durham; Bishop Moule, of Durham;
Bishop Harold Browne, of Winchester; Bishop Lord Arthur Hervey, of Bath
and Wells; Bishop Ryle, of Liverpool; Bishop Walsham How, of Wakefield;
Bishop Ridding, of Southwell; Bishop Moorhouse, of Manchester; Bishop
Mackarness, of Oxford; Bishop Chinnery-Haldane, of Argyll and the Isles;
Bishop Barry, Primate of Australia; Dean Kichten. Archdeacon
Wilberforce; Father Ignatius; General Booth, the founder of the Salvation
Army; Spurgeon; Hugh Price Hughes; Newman Hall; James Martineau; Stopford
Brooke.
Among prominent teachers and scholars and philosophers and writers and
artists and lawyers I find the following:--
Alfred Russel Wallace, Freeman, Froude, Leslie Stephen, Richard Holt
Hutton, Sir Henry Taylor, Sir Lewis Morris, George Macdonald, Blackmore,
Wilkie Collins, "Lewis Carroll," Robert Buchanan, Justin McCarthy, Sir
Arthur Arnold, Mrs. Somerville, Julia Wedgwood, Sir Edward Burne-Jones,
Walter Crane, Sir Henry Irving, Lord Brampton (Mr. Justice Hawkins), and
Lord Chief Baron Kelly.
I have made no research for great names in foreign countries, but some of
the most illustrious stand prominently before the world representing the
three greatest continental races:
Victor Hugo, Wagner, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Rousseau.
Here then I have brought together a very glorious company justifying the
title I have affixed to this book.
NOTE
From this great cloud of witnesses I have omitted all those leaders of
thought and morals, "friends of the wise and teachers of the good"
supporters of this great cause who are living. I followed a like reserve
in my "Memories," making in them none but passing allusions to famous
persons still alive. I do not share the modern journalistic habit of
uninvited public intrusion upon living people who may very well be
unwilling at the moment to be dragged into controversy or exposed to
insult; and every one knows that the vivisectors and their friends have
no manners, and flout all the Hague conventions of debate.
Books by the Hon. Stephen Coleridge
VIVISECTION:
A HEARTLESS SCIENCE
_Crown_ 8_vo_, 5_s._ _net_.
SOME PRESS OPINIONS.
_Times_.--"Mr. Coleridge is a leading champion of the anti-vivisection
cause, and he here presents a reasoned indictment of the practice. He is
a very able advocate, who generally gets the better of his opponent in a
dialectical bout, and this book is written with great skill and force."
_Western Mail_.--"One cannot fail to be interested and impressed by the
forensic power and ability in this book and by the humane spirit which
has led to its compilation. Mr. Coleridge brings all his power of wit,
irony, and sarcasm to the aid of his scientific knowledge."
_Harrogate Times_.--"The book is an epitome of reasons why 'all humane
and thoughtful people' should disapprove of vivisection, and the sinister
effects of the existence of this practice in our midst. The statements
are cogent, and will find a response in the heart of a wide
constituency."
JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD.
SONGS TO DESIDERIA
_Crown_ 8_vo._ 3_s._ 6_d._ _net_.
_Daily News_.--"These songs and poems are intensely and sincerely felt .
. . they have the fine, careful, literary coldness of some of the lyrics
of Landor or of the more serious work of Peacock. It is the poetry of a
refined and knightly nature . . . and it deserves to be studied and
remembered . . . its mood is austere and its temper noble."
_Globe_.--"Excellent verses, easy, melodious, and charming."
_Tribune_.--"All lovers of poetry will be grateful for Mr. Stephen
Coleridge's volume. Dainty and finished in execution, and instinct with
a genuine human sympathy, these lyrics betray the hand of a craftsman in
verse. . . . Verses of this quality should secure for 'Songs to
Desideria' a sincere welcome."
_Glasgow Herald_.--"The Hon. Stephen Coleridge has already established
his position among the more tuneful writers of true lyric verse, and into
all that he writes the poet puts delicacy and true emotion, the former
never becomes mere phrase, the latter never degenerates into wordy
passion."
_South Wales Daily News_.--"There is sometimes a depth of feeling in his
passages for which one usually looks only in the great masters of English
literature."
JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD.
MEMORIES
_With Twelve Illustrations_. _Demy_ 8_vo._ 7_s._ 6_d._ _net_.
_Observer_.--"Mr. Coleridge has furnished 'The Dictionary of National
Biography' (or the Victorian part of it) with a supplement of wit and
conversation. And one hardly knows at which to marvel most, the number
of celebrities he hauls up in his net, of the number of laughs he gets
out of them. His book is rich in fresh anecdote and the best light
elements of personality."
MR. JAMES DOUGLAS in the _Star_.--"The best book of reminiscences I have
read for a long time. It teems with good stories about famous and
familiar names."
_Morning Post_.--"Genuinely a record of the doings of others, and full of
anecdote and incident. Mr. Coleridge has written a delightful book, and
has told many interesting things of many famous men."
_Daily Chronicle_.--"Now this is the right sort of memories to put into
print; memories that are fresh and bright, piquant, and yet never
ill-natured, crowded with personal lights and anecdotes; in fine, a
volume of which one says: 'I would have liked to meet all those people
and write about them as Mr. Coleridge has done.'"
JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD.
AN EVENING IN MY LIBRARY AMONG THE ENGLISH POETS
_Crown_ 8_vo._ 3_s._ 6_d._ _net_.
_Guardian_.--"A charmingly desultory set of essays, generous in
appreciation, and not afraid to explore comparatively unbeaten tracks."
_Quarterly Review_.--"Every moment is one of pure literature. He quotes
his favourite poets freely, giving us not a line or two but often a whole
poem. . . . There is many a racy criticism, and the humanitarian peeps
out from not a few of them. It is a volume full of lovely verse, and one
that will not only give unalloyed pleasure, but will cultivate a taste
for the sweetest and purest poetry."
_Daily Mail_.--"Mr. Coleridge has written a very pleasant and readable
ramble among the poets. It is an anthology with a skilled writer leading
one on from gem to gem with delightful comment."
JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD.
Footnotes:
{16} My "Memories," p. 63
{40} The book had "Leicester" but this was crossed out and "Lichfield"
hand-printed in the margin.--DP.
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