Even should all the scientific men in Europe unite in a resolution that “vivisection is necessary,” just as all the Dominicans would have united three hundred years ago to resolve that autos-da-fé were “necessary,” or as all the lawyers and magistrates that the peine forte et dure was “necessary,” or as the statesmen of America did thirty years ago that negro slavery was “necessary,” yet the “necessity” will disappear in the case of the scientific torture of animals as in all the rest. The days of vivisection are numbered.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] A touching story of such sheep-gathering was recently told me on good authority. A shepherd lost his large flock on the Scotch mountains in a fog. After fruitless search, he returned to his cottage, bidding his collie find the sheep, if she could. The collie, who was near giving birth to her young, understood his orders, and disappeared in the mist, not returning for many hours. At last, she came home in miserable plight, driving before her the last stray sheep, and carrying in her mouth a puppy of her own! She had of necessity left the rest of her litter to perish on the hills and in the intervals of their birth the poor beast had performed her task and driven home the sheep. Her last puppy only she had contrived to save.
[22] The best effort to supply the missing chapter of ethics is the charming and eloquent volume, Rights of an Animal, by E. B. Nicholson. I thankfully recognize the candor wherewith the author has tackled the difficult problems of the case, and the value of his demonstration that the law of England assumes the fundamental principle that cruelty to an animal is an offence per se, and that it is not necessary to show that it injures any human owner or spectator. In this respect, as in all others, our Act (11 and 12 Vict. c. 39) immeasurably transcends the French Loi Grammont, which condemns only cruelty exhibited in public places and painful to the spectators. Mr. Nicholson justifies vivisection only so far as it can be rendered absolutely painless by anæsthetics. To such of us as have seen through that delusion, cadit quaestio.
[23] As a recent example of this doctrine, see an article in the Fortnightly Review for Feb. 1, 1882. “Is it not,” the author says, “the very basis of ethical doctrine(!) that the moral rights of any being depend on its ethical nature?”
[24] I have endeavored elsewhere to work out this hypothesis of an umpire between man and brute, as a method of helping us to a solution of the problem of what are and what are not lawful actions on our parts toward animals. The reader who may be interested in the inquiry may obtain my pamphlet, The Right of Tormenting, price 2d., at the office of the Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, 1 Victoria Street, Westminster.
[25] In fact, many men who pursue such trades, notably butchers, are genuinely humane, and do their best to get through their work in the most merciful way. Several of them have recently expressed warm satisfaction on obtaining Baxter’s mask, whereby oxen may be instantaneously killed without the chance of a misdirected blow. The mask is to be obtained from Mr. Baxter, Ealing Dean, W.
SACRIFICIAL MEDICINE.
The world has done wrong to laugh at the old lady who reproved her sailor grandson for “telling her such a scandalous fib as that he had seen a fish fly in the air,” but restored her confidence to the hopeful youth when he proceeded to narrate how he had picked up a wheel of Pharaoh’s chariot on the Red Sea shore. Practically, we all jump easily at beliefs toward the level of which we have already climbed by previous knowledge (or previous prejudice, as it may chance), and refuse, donkey-wise, to budge an inch toward those which happen to be on a plane above our preconceived notions of what either is or ought to be. It is this propensity, of course, which makes the most baseless calumny mischievous by paving the way for the next slander against its object. And it is it, also, which grants interminable leases of life to false systems of physics and religion by securing a welcome for every fiction and fallacy which at any time may seem to favor them, and closing the door in the face of truths which militate against and might explode them.
A curious study of the “Grammar of Assent,” as used by the majority of mankind in the matter which comes nearest to their own business and bosoms, might, I think, be made by unearthing the preconceived notions and preparatory ideas which must needs exist as regards the healing art, and which can have enabled doctors confidently to prescribe, and patients meekly to accept, the horrid and shocking remedies in use from the earliest period,—remedies of which it is a mild criticism to say that they were worse than the diseases they professed to cure. Had the minds of men concerned with medical inquiries been really free from antecedent convictions,—blank sheets of paper whereon Nature could have written down her facts, which experience might have read and collated,—it is clear enough that good diet, exercise, and cleanliness, and the occasional use of simple preparations of herbs, would early have constituted the primitive and sound rules of medical science, to be supplemented, as time went on, by discoveries of the therapeutic value of more rare vegetable substances and of a few minerals. Never could practical observation, by any possibility, have suggested that it would be beneficial to a sick man to make him swallow potable gold or powdered skulls, or a bolus of decomposed old toads and earth-worms. The un-“scientific use of the imagination” can alone have dictated these and scores of no less absurd and obnoxious prescriptions, prompted by some a priori theory of what ought, antecedently to experience, to be suitable for the cure of disease, and “in accordance with the eternal fitness of things.”