Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

For my own part I had accepted from the outset the assurance I received on all hands that a Bill for the total prohibition of Vivisection had not the remotest chance of passing through Parliament in the present state of public opinion; but that a Bill might be framed, which, proceeding only on the grounds of Restriction, might effectually and thoroughly exclude “not only torture but anything at all approaching thereto”; and that such a Bill had every chance of becoming law. To promote such a Bill had been my single aim and hope, and when it had been prepared and presented and received so favourably, it really appeared as if we were on the right and reasonable tack; much as we hated any concession whatever to the demands of the vivisectors.

But when we found that the compromise which we proposed had failed, and that our Bill providing the minimum of protection for animals at all acceptable by their friends, was twisted into a Bill protecting their tormentors, we were driven to raise our demands to the total prohibition of the practice, and to determine to work upon that basis for any number of years till public opinion be ripe for our measure.

This was one aspect of our position; but there was another. We had in truth gone into this crusade almost as our forefathers had set off for the Holy Land, with scarcely any knowledge of the Power which we were invading. We knew that dreadful cruelties had been done; but we fondly imagined they were abuses which were separable from the practice of experimenting on living animals. We accepted blindly the representation of Vivisection by its advocates as a rare resource of baffled surgeons and physicians, intent on some discovery for the immediate benefit of humanity or the solution of some pressing and important physiological problem; and we thought that with due and well considered restrictions and safeguards on these occasional experiments, we might effectually shut out cruelty. By slow, very slow degrees, we learned that nothing was much further from the truth than these fancy pictures of ideal Vivisection, and that real Vivisection is not the occasional and regretfully-adopted resource of a few, but the daily employment (Carl Vogt called it his “daily bread”) of hundreds of men and students, devoted to it as completely and professionally as butchers to cutting up carcases. Finally we found that to extend protection by any conceivable Act of Parliament to animals once delivered to the physiologists in their laboratories, was chimerical. Vivisection, we recognized at last to be a Method of Research which may be either sanctioned or prohibited as a Method, but which cannot be restricted efficiently by rules founded on humane considerations wholly irrelevant to the scientific enquiry.

On the moral side also, we became profoundly impressed with the truth of the principle to which Canon Liddon refers in the letter I have quoted, viz., that the Anti-Vivisection cause is “of even greater importance to human character than to the physical comfort of our fellow-creatures who are most immediately concerned.” As I wrote of it, about this time in Bernard’s Martyrs:—

“We stand face to face with a New Vice, new, at least in its vast modern development and the passion wherewith it is pursued—the Vice of Scientific Cruelty. It is not the old vice of Cruelty for Cruelty’s sake. It is not the careless brutal cruelty of the half-savage drunken drover, the low ruffian who skins living cats for gain, or of the classic Roman or modern Spaniard, watching the sports of the arena with fierce delight in the sight of blood and death. The new vice is nothing of this kind.... It is not like most other human vices, hot and thoughtless. The man possessed by it is calm, cool, deliberate; perfectly cognisant of what he is doing; understanding, as indeed no other man understands, the full meaning and extent of the waves and spasms of agony he deliberately creates. It does not seize the ignorant or hunger-driven or brutalized classes; but the cultivated, the well-fed, the well-dressed, the civilized, and (it is said) the otherwise kindly disposed and genial men of science, forming part of the most intellectual circles in Europe. Sometimes it would appear as we read of these horrors,—the baking alive of dogs, the slow dissecting out of quivering nerves, and so on,—that it would be a relief to picture the doer of such deeds as some unhappy, half-witted wretch, hideous and filthy in mien or stupified by drink, so that the full responsibility of a rational and educated human being should not belong to him, and that we might say of him, ‘He scarcely understands what he does.’ But, alas! this New Vice has no such palliations; and is exhibited not by such unhappy outcasts, but by some of the very foremost men of our time; men who would think scornfully of being asked to share the butcher’s honest trade: men addicted to high speculation on all the mysteries of the universe; men who hope to found the Religion of the Future, and to leave the impress of their minds upon their age, and upon generations yet to be born.”

Regarding the matter from this point of view,—as our leaders, the most eminent philanthropists of their generation, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Mount-Temple, Samuel Morley, and Cardinal Manning, emphatically did,—the reasons for calling for the total Prohibition of Vivisection rather than for its Restriction became actually clearer in our eyes on the side of the human moral interests than on that of the physical interests of the poor brutes. We felt that so long as the practice should be sanctioned at all, so long the Vice of Scientific Cruelty would spring up in the fresh minds of students, and be kept alive everywhere. It was therefore absolutely needful to reach the germ of the disease, and not merely to endeavour to allay the worst symptoms and outbreaks. It is the passion itself which needs to be sternly suppressed; and this can only be done by stopping altogether the practice which is its outcome, and on which it feeds and grows.

But (say our opponents), “Are you prepared to relinquish all the benefits which this practice brings to humanity at large?”

Our answer to them, of course, is, that we question the reality of those benefits altogether, but that, placing them at their highest estimation, they are of no appreciable weight compared to the certain moral injury done to the community by the sanction of cruelty. The discovery of the Elixir Vitæ itself would be too dearly purchased if the hearts of men were to be rendered one degree more callous and selfish than they are now. And that the practice of vivisection by a body of men at the intellectual summit of our social system, whose influence must dribble down through every stratum of society, would infallibly tend to increase such callousness, there can exist no reasonable doubt. For my own part, though believing that little or nothing worth mentioning has been discovered for the Healing Art through Vivisection, and that Dr. Leffingwell is right in saying that “if agony could be measured in money, no Mining Company in the world would sanction prospecting in such barren regions,” I yet deprecate the emphasis which many of our friends have laid on this argument against vivisection. We have gone off our rightful ground of the simple moral issues of the question and have seemed to admit (what very few of us would deliberately do) that if some important discovery had been made by Vivisection, our case against it would be lost or weakened. I have been so anxious to warn our friends against this, as I think, very grave mistake in tactics, that I circulated some time ago a little Parable which I may as well summarize here:—

“A party of Filibusters once proposed to ravage a neighbouring island, inhabited by poor and humble people who had always been faithful servants and friends of our country, and had in no way deserved ill-treatment. Some friends of justice protested that the Filibusters ought to be prohibited from carrying on their expedition, but unluckily they did not simply arraign the moral lawfulness of the project, but went on to discuss the inexpediency of the invasion, arguing that the island was very poor and barren, and would not repay the cost of conquest. Here the Filibusters saw their advantage and broke in: ‘No such thing! We are the only people who know anything about the island, and we assure you it is full of mines of gold and silver.’ ‘Bosh!’ replied the just men; ‘we defy you to show us a single nugget.’ On this there was a good deal of shuffling of feet among the Filibusters, and they exhibited some glittering fragments as gold, but being tested these proved to be worthless, and again other fragments which they produced were traced to quite another part of the district, far away from the island. Still it became evident that the Filibusters would go on interminably bringing up specimens, and some day might possibly produce one the value of which could not be well disputed. Moreover the Filibusters (who, like other pirates, were addicted to telling fearful yarns) had the great advantage of talking all along of things they had studied and seen, whereas the men of the party of justice were imperfectly informed about the resources of the island, having never gone thither, and thus they were easily placed at a disadvantage and made to appear foolish. It is true that the Filibusters had set them on the wrong track by clamouring for the invasion on the avowed ground of the spoil they should gather for the nation, and they had only tried to nullify the effect of such appeals to general selfishness by showing that there was really no spoil to be had; and that the invasion was a blunder as well as a crime. But in bandying such appeals to expediency they had put themselves in the wrong box; because to discuss the value of the spoil was, by implication to admit that, if it only were rich, it might possibly be justifiable to go and seize it!”

I have made this long explanation of our policy, because I am painfully aware that among practical people and men of the world, accustomed to compromise on public questions, our adoption of the demand for total prohibition has placed us at a great disadvantage as “irreconcilables;” and our movement has appeared as the “fad” of enthusiasts and fanatics. For the reasons I have given above I think it will appear that while compromise offered any hope of protecting our poor clients from the very worst cruelties, we tried it frankly and in earnest; first in Lord Henniker’s and secondly in Lord Carnarvon’s Bill. When this last effort failed we were left no choice but either to abandon our dumb friends to their fate, or demand for them the removal of the source of their danger.