“Now to come to the story of the Nine Circles, which I will tell as quickly as possible. When I gave up the Honorary Secretaryship of the Victoria Street Society six years ago, I retired to live among the mountains in Wales; and the chief thing which remained for me to do was to publish as many pamphlets and papers as seemed likely to help the cause. I have just got here my printer’s list of the papers which I have printed in those six years. I have made up the totals, and I find that the number in the six years of books, pamphlets, and leaflets has been 320—that is about one a week—and that 271,350 copies of them were printed; 173 papers having been written by myself. (Cheers.) Some of these were adopted by the Society and honoured by coming out under its auspices; and others I issued quite independently. Amongst those which I issued ‘on my own hook,’ I am happy to say, was this book called the Nine Circles. Therefore our dear and honoured Society is not responsible for that book. I am alone responsible; it was printed at my expense, and Messrs. Sonnenschein published it for me. Therefore, I am the only person concerned with it, and the Society has nothing to do with it. I am thankful to hear that the revised edition will come out under the auspices of the Society. My only privilege will be to pay for it, and that I shall most thankfully do, in order to wipe out the wrong I have done as concerns the present edition. When the present book was got up, I sketched a plan of it, and asked a lady often employed by us who was living in London, and is a good German scholar, to make extracts for me. She knows a great deal about the subject; she also knows German (which I do not do sufficiently for the purpose), and she was living in London while I was 200 miles away. Therefore I asked her to make the extracts of which this book is compiled, and it was afterwards revised,—as Dr. Berdoe has told us,—by him. The book came out; and it appears now that there are some mistakes in it. My assistant had left out certain things which ought to have been stated. I took it for granted,—I was quite wrong to do so,—that all my directions had been carried out, and I made myself responsible for the book. Therefore, whatever error there is in the matter is mine, and I beg that that will be quite understood. (Cheers.) But what is all this tremendous storm which has been raised, and this pulling of the house down about these mistakes? Do they wish us to understand that there are no such things as painful experiments in England? Apparently that is what they are trying to make us think—that there never has been anything of the kind; that they are perfectly incapable of putting any animal to pain. Do they really mean that? Is that what they wish us to understand? If they do not mean that, I do not know what it is they mean. It seems to me that they are raising this tremendous storm very much as if the old slave-holders were to have danced a war-dance round Mrs. Stowe and scalped her for having said that Legree had flogged Uncle Tom with a thousand lashes, when really there were only nine hundred and ninety-nine. (Laughter.) That seems to me to be the case in a nutshell.”—Zoophilist, November 1st, 1892.
I had the gratification to receive soon after the following most kind Address and expression of confidence from the leading Members of the Victoria Street Society:—
ADDRESS.
To Miss Frances Power Cobbe,
We, the undersigned, being supporters of the Victoria Street Society, and others interested in the movement against Vivisection, wish to express the strong feeling of indignation with which we have seen your integrity called in question by men who seem unable to conceive of the pure unselfish devotion of high intellectual gifts to the service of God’s humbler creatures.
It is impossible for those who know anything of the early history of this movement to forget the great personal sacrifice at which you undertook to make it the chief work of your life.
It is equally impossible for us who have watched its progress, to say how highly we have esteemed the indomitable courage and forcible eloquence with which you have exposed the evils inseparable from experiments on living animals.
Further, we wish to record our firm conviction that you have, throughout, recognised the wisdom and the duty of founding your attack on Vivisection upon the truth, and nothing but the truth, so far as you have been able to arrive at it.
We wish, in conclusion, to assure you not only of our special sympathy with you at a time when you have been subjected to a personal attack of an unusually coarse and violent character, but also of our determination to give still more earnest support to the Cause to which you have, at so great a cost, devoted yourself:
Strafford (Earl of Strafford)