At this most critical moment, and through the whole month of June, Lord Carnarvon, in whose hands the Bill lay, was drawn away from London and occupied by the illness and death of Lady Carnarvon. No words can tell the anxiety and alarm this occasioned us, when we learned that a large section of the medical profession, which had so far seemed quiescent if not approving, had been roused by their chief wire-puller into a state of exasperation at the supposed “insult” of proposing to submit them to legal control in experimenting on living animals, (as they were already subjected to it, by the Anatomy Act, in dissecting dead bodies). These doctors, to the number of 3,000, signed a Memorial to the Home Secretary, calling on him to modify the Bill so as practically to reverse its character, and make it a measure, no longer protecting vivisected animals from torture, but vivisectors from prosecution under Martin’s Act. This Memorial was presented on the 10th July by a Deputation, variously estimated at 300 and at 800 doctors, who, in either case, were sufficiently numerous to overflow the purlieus of the Home Office and to overawe Mr. Cross. On the 10th of August the Bill—essentially altered in submission to the medical memorialists—was brought by Mr. Cross into the House of Commons, and was read a second time. On the 15th August, 1876, it received the Royal Assent and became the Act 39–40 Vict., c. 77, commonly called the “Vivisection Act.”
The world has never seemed to me quite the same since that dreadful time. My hopes had been raised so high to be dashed so low as even to make me fear that I had done harm instead of good, and brought fresh danger to the hapless brutes for whose sake, as I realised more and more their agonies, I would have gladly died. I was baffled in an aim nearer to my heart than any other had ever been, and for which I had strained every nerve for many months; and of all the hundreds of people who had seemed to sympathise and had signed our Memorials and petitions, there were none to say: “This shall not be!” Justice and Mercy seemed to have gone from the earth.
We left London,—the Session and the summer being over, and came as usual to Wales; but our enjoyment of the beauty of this lovely land had in great measure vanished. Even after twenty years my friend and I look back to our joyous summers before that miserable one, and say, “Ah! that was when we knew very little of Vivisection.”
In my despair I wrote several letters of bitter reproach to the friends in Parliament who had allowed our Bill to be so mutilated as that the British Medical Journal crowed over it, as affording full liberty to “science”; and I also wrote to several newspapers saying that after this failure to obtain a reasonable restrictive Bill, I, for one, should labour henceforth to obtain total prohibition. In reply to my letter (I fear a very petulant one) Lord Shaftesbury wrote me this full and important explanation which I commend to the careful reading of such of our friends as desire now to rescind the Act of 1876.
“Castle Wemyss, Wemyss Bay, N.B.,
“Aug. 16th, 1876.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“Until we shall have seen the Act in print we cannot form a just estimate of the force of the amendments. Some few, so I see by the papers, were introduced in Committee, after my last interview with Mr. Cross; but of their character I know nothing. I am disposed, however, to believe that he would not have admitted anything of real importance.
“Mr. Cross’s difficulties were very great at all times; but they increased much as the Session was drawing to a close. The want of time, the extreme pressure of business, the active malignity of the Scientific men, and the indifference of his Colleagues, left the Secretary of State in a very weak and embarrassing position.
“Your letter, which I have just received, asks whether ‘the Bill cannot be turned out in the House of Lords?’ The reply is that, whether advisable or unadvisable, it cannot now be done, for the Parliament is prorogued.