In regard to Kossuth's manner of delivery in his great public speeches, Mr. Brace says: "His opening words, they say, were like Hungarian national airs, always low and plaintive in the utterance…. But gradually his face lighted up, his voice deepened and swelled with his feeling," and there came forth tones which thrilled his hearers with a strange rousing power.
CHAPTER XII
FOUR BARBARISMS OF CIVILIZATION
In every civilization there will always be found, sheltering under its wall, evil things not yet brought to book—not yet revealed in their true nature, but still dragging back the wheel of true progress and the betterment of humanity. Yet though they come "in such a questionable shape," it is often not until someone ahead of his or her age, pulls them into the open glare of another point of view, and thus shows up all their hidden moral leprosy, that the arrow of condemnation is driven full-tilt at them from the stretched bow of a Higher Criticism.
In Francis Newman's Miscellanies, Vol. III, four of these evil things are dragged by him into the open daylight of a mind far ahead of its age, and these four are: Cruelty to Animals; Degradation of Man, as brought about by the drink traffic; War, as the great throw-back to Civilization; Punishment as understood in England, and our own methods of reform as regards the treatment of misdemeanants.
To take the first of these—Cruelty to Animals. Of course there are three kinds: Legalized cruelty, cruelty caused by thoughtlessness, and cruelty caused in order to give pleasure to men and women. Of the first—well, of course this has to do with vivisection, said to be carried on for the advancement of science and for the sake of alleviating the sufferings of humanity.
As regards the first reason, men who know what they are talking about are pretty generally agreed that science has not largely benefited by vivisection. As regards the second, it is by no means sure that anything can be proved of direct use to mankind from discoveries made by doctors and scientists after operating on animals. "What sort of tenderness for man can we expect from surgeons who can thus teach by torture, or from students who can endure to listen?" Here Francis Newman puts his finger on a very significant factor in the case—that of the barbarizing, the deteriorating of the mind that cannot touch the black pitch of torture and not be defiled.
Everyone will remember the words of Lord Shaftesbury, one of the greatest men of his day: "I would rather be, before God, the poor victim in the torture-trough than the vivisector beside him." And it is this point also which is of importance in the vivisection question—not the point of view alone of the animal tortured, but as well the inevitable effect on the vivisector. For there are some things undeniably which, when done, do not leave the man who does them where he was before in the moral scale.
As Archdeacon Wilberforce says: "If all that is claimed by vivisectors were true—and I absolutely disbelieve it—the noblest attitude would be to refuse physical benefit obtained at the cost of secrets stolen from other lives by hideous torture." These words exactly express the attitude of all thoughtful men and women who feel the impossibility of accepting help at the cost of such torture to the lower creation by what the Archdeacon very aptly calls the "barbarities of science."
Well may Francis Newman say: "When we ask by what right a man tortures these innocent creatures, the only reply that can be given is, because we are more intelligent. If in the eye of God this is justifiable, then a just God might permit a devil to torture us in the cause of diabolic science…. To cut up a living horse day after day in order to practise students in dissection is a crime and abomination hardly less monstrous from his not having an immortal soul. An inevitable logic would in a couple of generations unteach all tenderness towards human suffering if such horrors are endured, and carry us back into greater heartlessness than that of the worst barbarians." The bill in 1876, of which the chief aim was to amend the law, to regulate better the doings of vivisectors, insisted on the fact that a licence from the Home Secretary was to be a sine quâ non in the case of all who practised these experiments upon animals. But experience of the way in which this law works shows quite clearly that very inadequate inspection takes place, because in so many cases inspectors and vivisectors play into each other's hands.