involve the torture of the most sensitive animals” she intended to endeavour to induce the Society “to condemn the practice altogether as inseparably bound up with criminal abuses”; and henceforth to adopt “the principle of uncompromising hostility to vivisection,” and she asked him to let her know whether he would give his support to her proposals. His reply was what might have been expected from one who could not permit his irritation at the fate of the Bill to influence his parliamentary attitude.
I am afraid [he wrote] my answer must be in a sense which you will think unfavourable. I could not commit myself out of Parliament to any view which I am not prepared to defend in it. And the unreasonableness and what I think wrongdoing of the Medical Men would not justify me as a legislator in voting for what I think wrong merely in opposition to them or because I could not bring them to terms which I think just and right.
I do not say that this is at all necessarily the rule for a person out of Parliament, because so long as you do not agitate for what you think wrong it is perfectly fair to agitate for more than you expect to get as a means of getting something of what you think right. So that I find no fault whatever with any one who takes the view you take; but my position is somewhat a peculiar one and I must be cautious to an extent that some people may think coldness and weakness. I am not afraid of your judgment however.
Six years later, in 1882, he wrote an article in the Fortnightly Review in which he definitely though reluctantly gave his adhesion to total abolition as the goal to be aimed at, but of course he never at any time associated himself with the condemnation of all other measures for the mitigation of the cruelties of the laboratory or of the world at large that has since been pronounced by the more extreme protagonists on the anti-vivisection side of the controversy.
This article dealt in a pungent severity with attacks made upon him in the Nineteenth Century by Sir James Paget, Professor Owen and Dr. Wilks. As far as I know none of them rejoined. They had had enough!
But the last passage of the article is of a quality that I think my readers will regard as fully justifying my reproducing it here,—I hope it will receive their endorsement—the hand that wrote it has long been still, but thirty-four years have not made one word of it less true or less beautiful.
There is one authority, conclusive, no doubt, only to those who admit it, conclusive only to those who believe that they can read it, to which in conclusion I dare appeal. When a bishop in the Southern States had been defending slavery, he was asked what he thought our Lord would have said, what looks He who turned and looked upon St. Peter would have cast upon a slave-mart in New Orleans, where husband was torn from wife, child from parent, and beautiful girls, with scarce a tinge of colour in them, were sold into prostitution. The answer of the bishop is not known, but I will venture on a kindred question. What would our Lord have said, what looks would He have bent, upon a chamber filled with “the unoffending creatures which He loves,” dying under torture deliberately and intentionally inflicted? or kept alive to endure further torment, in pursuit of knowledge? Men must answer this question according to their consciences; and for any man to make himself in such a matter a rule for any other would be, I know, unspeakable presumption. But to anyone who recognises the authority of our Lord, and who persuades himself that he sees which way that authority inclines, the mind of Christ must be the guide of life. “Shouldest thou not have had compassion upon these, even as I had pity on thee?” So He seems to me to say, and I shall act accordingly.
CHAPTER VI: JOHN RUSKIN
No one who has ever read a line of Ruskin could doubt on which side his mind and heart would be ranged in the controversy over vivisection.
Here was a lord of language who was also one of the great moral teachers of the world. To him the torture of a helpless animal for a scientific purpose was a defiance of religion and an insult to God. Such pursuits he declared “were all carried on in defiance of what had hitherto been held to be compassion and pity, and of the great link which bound together the whole of creation from its Maker to the lowest creature.”
