The League was soon engaged in controversies of various kinds. A little book entitled Animals’ Rights, which I wrote at the request of my friend, Mr. Ernest Bell, and which was published by his firm in 1892, led to a great deal of discussion, and passed through numerous editions, besides being translated into French, German, Dutch, Swedish, and other languages. Among its earliest critics was Professor D. G. Ritchie, who, in his work on Natural Rights, maintained that though “we may be said to have duties of kindness towards the animals, it is incorrect to represent these as strictly duties towards the animals themselves, as if they had rights against us.” (The italics are Mr. Ritchie’s.) There is a puzzle for you, reader. I took it to mean that, in man’s duty of kindness, it is the kindness only that has reference to the animals, the duty being a private affair of the man’s; the convenience of which arrangement is that the man can shut off the kindness whenever it suits him to do so, the kindness being, as it were, the water, and the duty the tap. For instance, when the question of vivisection arose, Mr. Ritchie at once turned off the water of kindness, though it had been very liberally turned on by him when he gave approval to the humanitarian protests against the barbarities of sport.
To this sophistical hair-splitting, in a matter of much practical importance, we from the first refused to yield, and made it plain that it was no battle of words in which we were engaged but one of ethical conduct, and that while we were quite willing to exchange the term “rights” for a better one, if better could be found, we would not allow the concept either of human “duties” or of animals’ “rights” to be manipulated in the manner of which Mr. Ritchie’s book gave a conspicuous example. Meanwhile the word “rights” held the field.
The old Catholic school was, of course, antagonistic to the recognition of animals’ rights, and we had controversies with Monsignor John S. Vaughan, among other sacerdotalist writers, when he laid down the ancient proposition that “beasts exist for the use and benefit of man.” It may be doubted whether argument is not a pure waste of time, when there is a fundamental difference of opinion as to data and principles: the sole reason for such debate was to ensure that the humanitarian view of the question was rightly placed before the public, and to show how strange was the alliance between sacerdotalist and vivisector. Evolutionary science has demonstrated beyond question the kinship of all sentient life; yet the scientist, in order to rake together a moral defence for his doings, condescends to take shelter under the same plea as the theologian, and having got rid of the old anthropocentric fallacy in the realm of science avails himself of that fallacy in the realm of ethics: a progressive in one branch of thought, he is still a medievalist in another.
Thus scientist and sacerdotalist between them would perpetuate the experimental tortures of the laboratory. Laborare est orare was the old saying; now it should be expanded by the Catholic school of vivisectionists into laboratorium est oratorium: the house of torture is the house of prayer. It is a beautiful and touching scene of reconciliation, this meeting of priest and professor over the torture-trough of the helpless animal. They might exclaim in Tennyson’s words:
There above the little grave,
O there above the little grave,
We kissed again with tears.
More exhilarating was the discussion when Mr. G. K. Chesterton entered the lists as champion of those high prerogatives of Mankind, which he saw threatened by the sinister devices of humanitarians, who, as he has explained in one of his books, “uphold the claims of all creatures against those of humanity.” A debate with Mr. Chesterton took place in the Essex Hall; and for several years afterwards the argument was renewed at times, as, for instance, when reviewing a book of mine on The Logic of Vegetarianism, he insisted[27] that “the difference between our moral relation to men and to animals is not a difference of degree in the least: it is a difference of kind.” The human race, he held, is a definite society, different from everything else. “The man who breaks a cat’s back breaks a cat’s back. The man who breaks a man’s back breaks an implied treaty.” To us, this terse saying of Mr. Chesterton’s seemed to contain unintentionally the root of all cruelty to animals, the quintessence of anthropocentric arrogance. The man who breaks a cat’s back, breaks a cat’s back. Yes, and the scientist who vivisects a dog, vivisects a dog; the sportsman who breaks up a hare, breaks up a hare. That is all. The victims are not human. But it is a distinction which has caused, in savage hands, the immemorial ill-usage of the lower animals through the length and breadth of the world.
Perhaps the strangest of Mr. Chesterton’s charges against humanitarians was one which he made in his book Orthodoxy, that their trend is “to touch fewer and fewer things,” i.e. to abstain from one action after another until they are left in a merely negative position. He failed to see that while we certainly desire to touch fewer and fewer things with whip, hob-nailed boot, hunting-knife, scalpel, or pole-axe, we equally desire to get into touch with more and more of our fellow-beings by means of that sympathetic intelligence which tells us that they are closely akin to ourselves. Why, ultimately, do we object to such practices as vivisection, blood-sports, and butchery? Because of the cruelty inseparable from them, no doubt; but also because of the hateful narrowing of our own human pleasures which these barbarous customs involve. A recognition of the rights of animals implies no sort of disparagement of human rights: this indeed was clearly indicated in the sub-title of my book, Animals’ Rights “considered in relation to social progress.”
During the winter of 1895-96, a course of lectures on “Rights,” as viewed from various standpoints—Christian, ethical, secularist, scientific, theosophical, and humanitarian—was organized by the Humanitarian League; and of these perhaps the most significant was Mr. Frederic Harrison’s address on the ethical view, in which it was maintained that “man’s morality towards the lower animals is a vital and indeed fundamental part of his morality towards his fellow-men.” At this same meeting some discussion arose on the far from unimportant question of nomenclature, objection being taken to Mr. Harrison’s use of the term “brute,” which he, on his part, defended as being scientifically correct, and, in the sense of “inarticulate,” wholly void of offence, even when applied to such highly intelligent beings as the elephant, the horse, or the dog. Humanitarians, however, have generally held that the meaning of the word “brute,” in this connection, is not “inarticulate” but “irrational,” and that for this reason it should be discarded, on the ground that to call an animal a brute, or irrational, is the first step on the path to treating him accordingly. “Give a dog a bad name,” says the proverb; and directly follows the injunction: “and hang him.”
For like reasons the Humanitarian League always looked with disfavour on the expression “dumb animals,” because, to begin with, animals are not dumb, and secondly, nothing more surely tends to their depreciation than thus to attribute to them an unreal deficiency or imperfection: such a term may be meant to increase our pity, but in the long run it lessens what is more important, our respect. In this matter the League was glad to have the support of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, who, as long ago as 1877, had written satirically in the Athenæum of what he called “the great human fallacy” conveyed in the words “the dumb animals,” and had pointed out that animals are no more dumb than men are. Years afterwards he wrote to me to inquire about the authorship of an article in the Humanitarian in which the same conclusion was reached, and expressed his full sympathy with our point of view.
But much more difficult to contend with than any anti-humanitarian arguments is the dull dead weight of that unreasoning prejudice which cannot see consanguinity except in the conventional forms, and simply does not comprehend the statement that “the animals” are our fellow-beings. There are numbers of good and kindly folk with whom, on this question, one never reaches the point of difference at all, but is involved in impenetrable misapprehensions: there may be talking on either side, but communication there is none. Tell them, in Howard Moore’s words, that the non-human beings are “not conveniences but cousins,” and they will answer, assentingly, that they are all in favour of “kindness to animals”; after which they will continue to treat them not as cousins but as conveniences. This impossibility of even making oneself intelligible was brought home to me with great force, some years ago, in connection with the death of a very dear friend, a cat, whose long life of fifteen years had to be ended in the chloroform-box owing to an incurable ailment. The veterinary surgeon whose aid I invoked was an extremely kind man, for whose skill I shall always feel grateful; and from his patience and sympathetic manner I thought he partly understood what the occasion meant to me—that, like a human death-bed, it was a scene that could never pass from the mind. It was, therefore, with something of an amused shock that I recollected, after he had gone, what I had hardly noticed at the moment, that he had said to me, as he left the door: “You’ll be wanting a new pussy-cat soon.”