Chapter XX Claims of Brutes
Readers who have reached this twentieth Chapter of my Life will smile (as I have often done of late years) at the ascription to me in sundry not very friendly publications, of exclusive sympathy for animals and total indifference to human interests. I have seen myself frequently described as a woman “who would sacrifice any number of men, women and children, sooner than that a few rabbits should be inconvenienced.” Many good people apparently suppose me to represent a personal survival of Totemism in England; and to worship Dogs and Cats, while ready to consign the human race generally to destruction.
The foregoing pages, describing my life in old days in Ireland and the years which I spent afterwards working in the slums in Bristol, ought, I think, to suffice to dissipate this fancy picture. As a matter of fact, it has only been of late years and since their wrongs have appealed alike to my feelings of pity and to my moral sense, that I have come to bestow any peculiar attention on animals; or have been concerned with them more than is common with the daughters of country squires to whom dogs, horses and cattle are familiar subjects of interest from childhood. I have indeed always felt much affection for dogs: that is to say, for those who exhibit the true Dog-character,—which is far from being the case of every canine creature! Their eagerness, their joyousness, their transparent little wiles, their caressing and devoted affection, are to me more winning, even I may say, more really and intensely human (in the sense in which a child is human), than the artificial, cold and selfish characters one meets too often in the guise of ladies and gentlemen. It is not the four legs, nor the silky or shaggy coat of the dog which should prevent us from discerning his inner nature of Thought and Love; limited Thought, it is true; but quite unlimited Love. That he is dumb, is, to me, only another claim (as it would be in a human child) on my consideration. But because I love good dogs, and, in their measure also, good horses and cats and birds, (I had once a dear and lovely white pea-hen), I am not therefore a morbid Zoophilist. I should be very sorry indeed to say or think like Byron when my dog dies, that I “had but one true friend, and here he lies!” I have,—thank God!—known many men and women, who have all a dog’s merits of honesty and single-hearted devotion plus the virtues which can only flourish on the high level of humanity; and to them I give a friendship which the best of dogs cannot share.
That there are some Timons in the world whose hearts, embittered by human ingratitude, have turned with relief to the faithful love of a dog, I am very well aware. Surely the fact makes one appeal the more on behalf of the creatures who thus by their humble devotion heal the wounds of disappointed or betrayed affection; and who come to cheer the lonely, the unloved, the dull-witted, the blind, the poverty-stricken whom the world forsakes? I think Lamartine was right to treat this love of the Dog for Man as a special provision of Divine mercy, and to marvel,—
“Par quelle pitié pour nos cœurs Il vous donne
Pour aimer celui que n’aime plus personne!”
Not a few deep thanksgivings, I believe, have gone up to the Maker of man and brute for the silent sympathy,—expressed perhaps in no nobler way than by the gentle licking of a passive hand,—which has yet saved a human heart from the sense of utter abandonment.
But I have no such sorrowful or embittering experience of human affection. I do not say, “The more I know of men the more I love dogs”; but, “The more I know of dogs the more I love them,” without any invidious comparisons with men, women, or children. As regards the children, indeed, I have been always fond of those which came in my way; and if the Tenth Commandment had gone on to forbid coveting one’s neighbour’s “child,” I am not sure that I should not have had to plead guilty to breaking it many times.
In my old home I possessed a dear Pomeranian dog of whom I was very fond, who, being lame, used constantly to ensconce herself (though forbidden by my father) in my mother’s carriage under the seat, and never showed her little pointed nose till the britzska had got so far from home that she knew no one would put her down on the road. Then she would peer out and lie against my mother’s dress and be fondled. Later on I had the companionship of another beautiful, mouse-coloured Pomeranian, brought as a puppy from Switzerland. In my hardworking life in Bristol in the schools and workhouse she followed me and ingratiated herself everywhere, and my solitary evenings were much the happier for dear Hajjin’s company. Many years afterwards she was laid under the sod of our garden in Hereford Square. Another dog of the same breed whom I sent away at one year old to live in the country, was returned to me eight years afterwards, old and diseased. The poor beast recognized me after a few moments’ eager examination, and uttered an actual scream of joy when I called her by name; exhibiting every token of tender affection for me ever afterwards. When one reflects what eight years signify in the life of a dog,—almost equivalent to the distance between sixteen and sixty in a human being,—some measure is afforded by this incident of the durability of a dog’s attachment. Happily, kind Dr. Hoggan cured poor Dee of her malady, and she and I enjoyed five happy years of companionship ere she died here in Hengwrt. I have dedicated my Friend of Man to her memory.
Among my smaller literary tasks in London I wrote an article for which Mr. Leslie Stephen (then editing the Cornhill Magazine in which it appeared) was kind enough to express particular liking. It was called “Dogs whom I have met;” and gave an account of many canine individualities of my acquaintance. I also wrote an article in the Quarterly Review on the Consciousness of Dogs of which I have given above (p. 127) Mr. Darwin’s favourable opinion. Both of these papers are reprinted in my False Beasts and True. Such has been the sum total, I may say, of my personal concern with animals before and apart from my endeavours to deliver them from their scientific tormentors.
It was, as I have stated, the abominable wrongs endured by animals which first aroused, and has permanently maintained, my special interest in them. My great-grandfather had an office in the yard at Newbridge for his magisterial work, and over his own seat he caused to be inscribed the text: “Deliver him that is oppressed from the hand of the adversary.” I know not whether it were a juvenile impression, but I have felt all my life an irresistible impulse to rush in wherever anyone is “oppressed” and try to “deliver” him, her, or it, as the case may be, from the “adversary!” In the case of beasts, their helplessness and speechlessness appeal, I think, to every spark of generosity in one’s heart; and the command, “Open thy mouth for the dumb,” seems the very echo of our consciences. Everything in us, manly or womanly, (and the best in us all is both) answers it back.
When I was a little child, living in a house where hunting, coursing, shooting, and fishing, were carried on by all the men and boys, I took such field sports as part of the order of things, and learned with delight from my father to fish in our ponds on my own account. Somehow it came to pass that when, at sixteen, my mind went through that strange process which Evangelicals call “Conversion,” among the first things which my freshly-awakened moral sense pointed out was,—that I must give up fishing! I reflected that the poor fishes were happy in their way in their proper element; that we did not in the least need, or indeed often use them for food; and that I must no longer take pleasure in giving pain to any creature of God. It was a little effort to me to relinquish this amusement in my very quiet, uneventful life; but, as the good Quaker’s say, it was “borne in on me,” that I had to do it, and from that time I have never held a rod or line (though I have been out in boats where large quantities of fish were caught on the Atlantic coast), and I freely admit that angling scarcely comes under the head of cruelty at all, and is perfectly right and justifiable when the fish are wanted for food and are killed quickly. I used to stand sometimes after I had ceased to fish, over one of the ponds in our park and watch the bright creatures dart hither and thither, and say in my heart a little thanksgiving on their behalf instead of trying to catch them.
Fifty years after this incident, I read in John Woolman’s, (the Quaker Saint’s,) Journal, Chap. XI., this remark:—
“I believe, where the love of God is verily perfected and the true spirit of government watchfully attended, a tenderness towards all creatures made subject to us will be experienced, and a care felt in us that we do not lessen that sweetness of life in the animal creation which the great Creator intends for them under our government.”
To me as I have said it was almost the first, and not an advanced, much less “perfected,” religious impulse, which led me to begin to recognise the claims of the lower animals on our compassion. Of course, I disliked then, and always, hunting, coursing and shooting; but as a woman I was not expected to join in such pursuits, and I did not take on myself to blame those who followed them. I do not now allow of any comparison between the cruelty of such Field Sports and the deliberate Chamber-Sport of Vivisection.
I shall now relate as succinctly as possible the history of the Anti-vivisection Movement, so far as I have had to do with it. Of course an immense amount of work for the same end has been carried on all these twenty years by other Zoophilists with whom I have had no immediate connection, or perhaps cognizance of their labours, but without whose assistance the Society which I helped to found certainly could not have made as much way as it has done. I only presume here to tell the story of the Victoria Street Society, and the occurrences which led to its formation.
In the year 1863, there appeared in several English newspapers complaints of the cruelties practised in the Veterinary Schools at Alfort near Paris. The students were taught there, as in most other continental veterinary schools, to perform operations on living animals, and so to acquire, (at the cost, of course, of untold suffering to the victims,) the same manipulative skill which English students gain equally well by practising on dead carcases. Living horses were supplied to the Alfort students on which, at the time I speak of, they performed sixty operations apiece, including every one in common use, and many which were purely academic, being never employed in actual practice because the horse, after enduring them, becomes necessarily useless. These operations lasted eight hours, and the aspect of the mangled creatures, hoofless, eyeless, burned, gashed, eviscerated, skinned, mutilated in every conceivable way, appalled the visitors, who reported the facts, while it afforded, they said, a subject of merriment to the horde of students. The English Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals laudably exerted itself to stop these atrocities, and appealed to the Emperor to interfere; not, perhaps, very hopefully, since, as I have heard, Napoleon III. was in the habit of attending these hideous spectacles in his own imperial person on the Thursdays on which they took place. This circumstance, taken in connection with the Empress’ patronage of Bull-Fights, has made Sedan seem to me an event on which the animal world, at all events, has to be congratulated.
Some years later Mr. James Cowie took over to France an Appeal, signed by 500 English Veterinarians entreating their French colleagues to adopt the English practice of using only dead carcases for the exercises of students. Through this and other good offices it is understood that the number and severity of the operations performed at Alfort, and elsewhere in France, were then greatly reduced. Unhappily the humane regulations made in 1878 are now evaded, and the dreadful cruelties above described have been actually witnessed by Mr. Peabody and Dr. Baudry, in 1895.
On reading of these cruelties I wrote an article, The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes, which I hoped might help to direct public attention to them. In this paper I endeavoured to work out as best I could the ethical problem (which I at once perceived to be beset with difficulties) of a definition of the limits of human rights over animals. My article was published by Mr. Froude in Fraser’s Magazine for Nov., 1863, and was subsequently reprinted in my Studies Ethical and Social. It was, so far as I know the first effort made to deal with the moral questions involved in the torture of animals either for sake of scientific and therapeutic research, or for the acquirement of manipulative skill. In the 30 years which have elapsed since I wrote it I have seen reason to raise considerably the “claims” which I then urged on behalf of the brutes, but I observe that new recruits to our Anti-vivisection party usually begin exactly where I stood at that time, and announce their ideas to me as their mature conclusions.
The same month of November, 1863, in which my article, (written some weeks before, while I was ill and lame at Aix-les-Bains), appeared in Fraser, I was living near Florence, and was startled by hearing of similar cruelties practised at the Specola, where Prof. Schiff had his laboratory. My friend Miss Blagden and I were holding our usual weekly reception in Villa Brichieri on Bellosguardo, and we learned that many of our guests had been shocked by the rumours which had reached them. In particular the American physician who had accompanied Theodore Parker to Florence and attended him in his last days,—Dr. Appleton, of Harvard University,—told us that he himself had gone over Prof. Schiff’s laboratory, and had seen dogs, pigeons and other animals in a frightfully mangled and suffering state. A Tuscan officer had seen a cat so tortured that he forced Schiff to kill it. Some 50 or 60 letters had been (or were afterwards) lodged at the Mairie from neighbours complaining of the disturbance caused by the cries and moans of the victims in the Specola. After much conversation I asked, What could be done to check these systematic cruelties, which no Tuscan law could then touch in any way? It was suggested that a Memorial should be addressed to Prof. Schiff himself, urging him to spare his victims as much as possible. This Memorial I drafted at once, and it was translated into Italian and sent round Florence for signatures. Mrs. Somerville placed her name at the head of it; and through her earnest exertions and those of her daughters and of several other friends, the list of supporters soon became very weighty. Among the English signatures was those of Walter Savage Landor (who added some words so violent that I was obliged to suppress them!); and among the Italians almost the whole historic aristocracy of old Florence,—Corsi’s and Corsini’s, and Aldobrandini’s and Strozzi’s, and a hundred more, the reading of whose names recalled Medicean times. In all, there were 783 signatories. Very few of them were of the mezzo-ceto class, and none belonged to the (Red) Republican party. Schiff was himself a “Red,” and, as such, he might, apparently, commit any cruelty he thought fit, inasmuch as he and the other vivisectors (we were told by a lady prominent in that party) were seeking “the religion of the future”—in the brains and entrails of the tortured beasts! The same lady expressed to me her wish that “every animal in creation should be immolated, if only to discover a single fact of science.” Another Englishwoman (also married to a foreigner) wrote to the Daily News to praise Schiff for “actively pursuing Vivisection.”
The Memorial, as often happens, did no direct good; Professor Schiff tossing it aside, and politely qualifying the signatories, (in the Nazione newspaper,) as “un tas de Marquis.” But it certainly caused the subject to be much discussed, and doubtless prepared the way for the complaints and lawsuits concerning the “nuisances” of the moaning dogs, which eventually made Florence an unpleasant abode for Professor Schiff. He retreated thence to Geneva in 1877. The Florentine Società Protettrice degli Animali was founded by Countess Baldelli in 1873, and has led the agitation there against Vivisection ever since.
Meanwhile on the presentation of the Memorial, Professor Schiff wrote a letter in the Nazione (the chief newspaper of Florence) denying the facts mentioned in the letter of the official Correspondent of the Daily News, and challenging the said correspondent to come forward and make good the statement. I instantly wrote a letter saying that I was the Daily News’ Correspondent in Florence; that the letter complained of was mine; and that for verification of my assertions therein I appended a full and signed statement by Dr. Appleton of what he had himself witnessed in the Specola.
It was rather difficult for me then to believe that this letter of mine (in Italian of course) duly signed and authenticated with name, date and place, was refused publication in the paper wherein I had been challenged to come forward! On learning this amazing fact, I requested Dr. Appleton to go down again to Florence and ask the editor of the Nazione to publish my letter if in no other way, at least as a paid advertisement. The answer made by the editor to Dr. Appleton was, that it might be inserted, but only among the advertisements in certain columns of the paper where no decent reader would look for it. N.B.—the Nazione replenished its exchequer by the help of that class of notices which are declined by every reputable English newspaper. After this Dr. Appleton went in despair to Professor Schiff himself, and told him he was bound in honour, (seeing he had made the challenge to us,) to compel the editor to print our answer. The learned and scientific gentleman shrugged his shoulders and laughed in the face of the American who could imagine him to be so simple!
I left Florence soon after this first brush with the demon of Vivisection, but retained (as will easily be understood) very strong feelings on the subject.
At a meeting of the British Association in Liverpool in 1870 a Committee was appointed to consider the subject of “Physiological Experimentation,” and their Report was published in the Medical Times and Gazette, Feb. 25th, 1871; and in British Assoc. Reports, 1871, p. 144. It consists of the following four Rules or Recommendations on the subject of Vivisection:—
“(I.) No experiment which can be performed under the influence of an anæsthetic ought to be done without it. (II.) No painful experiment is justifiable for the mere purpose of illustrating a law or fact already demonstrated; in other words, experimentation without the employment of anæsthetics is not a fitting exhibition for teaching purposes. (III.) Whenever, for the investigation of new truth, it is necessary to make a painful experiment, every effort should be made to ensure success, in order that the sufferings inflicted may not be wasted. For this reason, no painful experiment ought to be performed by an unskilled person, with insufficient instruments and assistants, or in places not suitable to the purpose; that is to say, anywhere except in physiological and pathological laboratories, under proper regulations. (IV.) In the scientific preparation for veterinary practice, operations ought not to be performed upon living animals for the mere purpose of obtaining greater operative dexterity.”
These four Rules were countersigned by M. A. Lawson, G. M. Humphry (now Sir George Humphry), J. H. Balfour, Arthur Gamgee, William Flower, J. Burdon-Sanderson, and George Rolleston. Of course we, who attended that celebrated Liverpool Meeting of the British Association and had heard the President laud Dr. Brown-Séquard enthusiastically, greatly rejoiced at this humane Ukase of autocratic Science.
But as time passed we were surprised to find that nothing was done to enforce these rules in any way or at any place; and that the particular practice which they most distinctly condemn, namely, the use of vivisections as Illustrations of recognised facts,—was flourishing more than ever without let or hindrance. The prospectuses of University College for 1874–5, of Guy’s Hospital Medical School 1874–5, of St. Thomas’s Hospital, of Westminster Hospital Medical School, etc., all mentioned among their attractions: “Demonstrations on living animals;” “Gentlemen will themselves perform the experiments;” &c., and quite as if nothing whatever had been said against them.
But worse remained. One of the signatories of the above Rules (or as perhaps we may more properly call them, these “Pious Opinions”?),—the most eminent of English physiologists, Prof. Burdon-Sanderson himself, edited and brought out in 1873, the Handbook of the Physiological Laboratory, to which he, Dr. Lauder-Brunton, Dr. Klein, and Dr. Foster were joint contributors. This celebrated work is a Manual of Exercises in Vivisection, intended (as the Preface says) “for beginners in Physiological work.” The following are observations on this book furnished to the Royal Commission by Mr. Colam, and printed in Appendix iv., p. 379, of their Report and Minutes of Evidence:—
“That the object of the editor and his coadjutors was to induce young persons to perform experiments on their own account and without adequate surveillance is manifest throughout the work, by the supply of elementary knowledge and elaborate data. Not only are the names and quantities of necessary chemicals given, but the most careful description is provided in letter-press and plates of implements for holding animals during their struggles, so that a novice may learn at home without a teacher. Besides, the editor’s preface states, that the book is ‘intended for beginners,’ and that ‘difficult and complicated’ experiments consequently have been omitted; and that of Dr. Foster allures the student by assurances of inexpensive as well as easy manipulation.... Very seldom indeed is the student told to anæsthetise, and then only during an operation. It cannot be alleged that ‘beginners’ know when to narcotise, and when not; but if they do then the few directions to use chloral, &c., are unnecessary. No doubt should have been left on this point in a Handbook designed ‘for beginners.’ Besides, where will students find cautions against the infliction of unnecessary pain, and wanton experimentation? On the contrary, the student is encouraged to repeat the torture ‘any number of times.’ These facts are significant.”
In the Minutes of Evidence of the Royal Commission we find that the late Prof. Rolleston, of Oxford, being under examination, was asked by Mr. Hutton: “Then I understand that your opinion about the Handbook is, that it is a dangerous book to society, and that it has warranted to some extent the feeling of anxiety in the public which its publication has created?” Prof. Rolleston: “I am sorry to have to say that I do think it is so” (1351). In his own examination Prof. Burdon-Sanderson admitted that the use of anæsthetics whenever possible “ought to have been stated much more distinctly at the beginning of his book” (2265), and agreed to Lord Cardwell’s suggestion, “Then I may assume that in any future communication with ‘beginners’ greater pains will be taken to make them distinctly understand how animals may be saved from suffering than has been taken in this book?” “Yes,” said Dr. B.-S., “I am quite willing to say that” (2266).
Esoteric Vivisection it will be observed, as revealed in Handbooks for “Beginners,” is a very different thing from Exoteric Vivisection, described for the benefit of the outside public as if regulated by the Four Rules above quoted!
The following year, 1874, certain experiments were performed before a Medical Congress at Norwich. They consisted in the injection of alcohol and of absinthe into the veins of dogs; and were done by M. Magnan, an eminent French physiologist, who has in recent years described sympathy for animals as a special form of insanity. Mr. Colam, on behalf of the R.S.P.C.A., very properly instituted a prosecution against M. Magnan, under the Act 12 and 13 Vict., c. 92; and brought Sir William Fergusson, and Dr. Tufnell (the President of the Irish College of Surgeons) to swear that his experiments were useless. M. Magnan withdrew speedily to his own country or a conviction would certainly have been obtained against him. But it was not merely on proof of the infliction of torture that Mr. Colam’s Society relied to obtain such conviction, but on the high scientific authority which they were able to bring to prove that the torture was scientifically useless. Failing such testimony, which would generally be unattainable, it was recognised that the application of the Act in question (Martin’s Act amended) to scientific cruelties, which it had not been framed to meet, would always be beset with difficulties. It became thenceforth apparent to the friends of animals that some new legislation, calculated to reach offenders pleading scientific purpose for barbarous experiments was urgently needed; and the existence of the Handbook, with minute directions for performing hundreds of operations,—many of them of extreme severity,—proved that the danger was not remote or theoretical; but already present and at our doors.
A few weeks after this trial at Norwich had taken place, and had justly gained great applause for Mr. Colam and the R.S.P.C.A., Mrs. Luther Holden, wife of the eminent surgeon, then Senior Surgeon of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, called on me in Hereford Square to talk over the matter and take counsel as to what could be done to strengthen the law in the desired direction. The great and wealthy R.S.P.C.A. was obviously the body with which it properly lay to promote the needed legislation; and it only seemed necessary to give the Committee of that Society proof that public opinion would strongly support them in calling for it, to induce them to bring a suitable Bill, into Parliament backed by their abundant influence. I agreed to draft a Memorial to the Committee of the R.S.P.C.A. praying it to undertake this task; after learning from Mr. Colam that such an appeal would be altogether welcome; and I may add that I received cordial assistance from him in arranging for its presentation.
It was a difficult task for me to draw up that Memorial, but, such as it was, it acted as a spark to tinder, showing how much latent feeling existed on the subject. Many ladies and gentlemen: notably the Countess of Camperdown, the Countess of Portsmouth (now the Dowager Countess), General Colin Mackenzie, Col. Wood (now Sir Evelyn) and others, exerted themselves most earnestly to obtain influential signatures in their circles, and distributed in all directions copies of the Memorial and of two pamphlets I wrote to accompany it—“Reasons for Interference” and “Need of a Bill.” With their help in the course of about six weeks, (without advertisements or paid agency of any kind), we obtained 600 signatures; every one of which represented a man or woman of some social importance. The first to sign it was my neighbour and friend, Rev. Gerald Blunt, rector of Chelsea. After him came Mr. Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Mr. Lecky, Sir Arthur Helps, Sir W. Fergusson, John Bright, Mr. Jowett, the Archbishop of York (Dr. Thomson), Sir Edwin Arnold, the Primate of Ireland (Marcus Beresford), Cardinal Manning (then Archbishop of Westminster), the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, John Ruskin, James Martineau, the Duke of Rutland, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Coleridge, Lord Selborne, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, the Bishops of Winchester, Exeter, Salisbury, Manchester, Bath and Wells, Hereford, St. Asaph, and Derry, Lord Russell, and many other peers and M.P.’s, and no less than 78 medical men, several of whom were eminent in the profession.
I shall insert here a few of the replies, favourable and otherwise, which I received to my invitations to sign the Memorial.
“Bishopthorpe, York,
“Dec. 28th, 1874.
“The Archbishop of York presents his compliments to Miss Cobbe and begs to enclose the Memorial signed by him.
“‘Exception to suggestion 3rd,’ on the prohibition of publishing, which he thinks unworkable, and therefore (illegible) to the Memorial. If however it is too late to alter it, he will not stand out even on that point.
“He thinks the practices in question detestable. The Norwich case was a disgrace to the country.
“The Archbishop thanks Miss Cobbe for inviting him to sign.”
“A. B. Beresford-Hope to Miss F. P. C.
“Bedgebury Park, Cranbrook,
“Jan. 26th, 1875.
“Dear Madam,
“Lady Mildred and myself trust that it is not too late to enclose to you the accompanying signatures to the Memorial against Vivisection, although the day fixed for its return has unfortunately been allowed to elapse. We can assure you of our very hearty sympathy in the cause; the delay has wholly come of oversight.
“In regard to the details of the suggestions, I must be allowed to express my doubt as to the feasibility of the 3rd suggestion. Its stringency would I fear defeat its own object. I sympathise too much with the question in itself to decline signing on account of this proposal, but I must request to be considered as a dissentient on that head.
“Believe me, dear Madam, yours very faithfully,
“A. B. Beresford-Hope.”
“B. Jowett to Miss F. P. C.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have much pleasure in signing the paper which you kindly sent me.
“Yours very sincerely,
“B. Jowett.
“Jan. 15th, Oxford.”
“5, Gordon Street, London, W.C.,
“January 5th, 1875.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I should have been very sorry not to join in the Protest against this hideous offence, and am truly obliged to you for furnishing me with the opportunity. The simultaneous loss, from the Morals of our ’advanced’ scientific men, of all reverent sentiment towards beings above them and towards beings below, is a curious and instructive phenomenon, highly significant of the process which their nature is undergoing at both ends.
“With truest wishes for many a happy and beneficent year
“Ever faithfully yours,
“James Martineau.”
“Manchester,
“December 26th, 1874.
“The Bishop of Manchester” [Dr. Fraser] “presents his compliments to Miss Cobbe, and thanks her for giving him the opportunity of appending his name to this Memorial, which has his most hearty concurrence.”
“Palace, Salisbury,
“11th January, 1875.
“The Bishop of Salisbury’s compliments to Miss Cobbe. He cannot withhold his signature to her Paper after reading the ‘reasons which she has kindly sent him.’”
“Addington Park, Croydon,
“January 2nd, 1875.
“Madam,
“I have received your letter of the 31st ult. on the subject of the Memorial to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals with regard to Vivisection.
“I hardly think I should be right, considering my imperfect acquaintance with the subject, in adding my name thereto at present.
“Believe me to be, yours faithfully,
“A. C. Cantuar.”
(Archbishop Tait.)
“Deanery, Carlisle,
“January 20th, 1875.
“Dear Madam,
“If I had a hundred signatures you should have them all!
“My heart has long burned with indignation against these murderers and torturers of innocent animals.
“Was it for this that the great God made man the Lord of the creation?
“It is incredible hypocrisy and folly to pretend that such wholesale torture is necessary to enlighten these stupid doctors!
“It seems to me peculiarly ungrateful in man, to break forth in this wholesale Animal Inquisition when Providence has so recently revealed to us several new natural powers whereby human suffering is so much diminished.
“But I must restrain my feelings, and you must pardon me. I did not know that this good work was begun.
“Only get some thoroughgoing and able friend of the animal world to tell the tale to a British House of Parliament, and these philosophic torturers will be stayed in their detestable course.
“Yours,
“F. Close.”
(Dean of Carlisle.)
“27, Cornwall Gardens, S.W.,
“December 30th, 1874.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have an impression that the subject of Vivisection is to be brought before the Senate of the University of London, which consists mainly of great physicians and surgeons, but of which I am a member. Hence I think I hardly ought to sign the paper you have sent me.
“This, you see is an official answer, but I am glad to be able to make it, for the truth is I have neither thought nor enquired sufficiently about Vivisection to be ready with a clear opinion.
“Even if the utmost be proved against the vivisectors, I am inclined to think that they ought to be dealt with as guilty of a new offence, and not of an old one. I do not at all like the notion of bringing old laws such as Martin’s Act against cruelty to animals, to bear on a class of cases never contemplated at the time of their enactment. It has a certain resemblance to enforcing the old law of blasphemy against persons who discuss Christianity in the modern philosophical spirit. Perhaps I am the more sensitive on this point since a friend elaborately demonstrated to me that I was liable to prosecution for what seemed to me a very innocent passage in a book of mine!
“Believe me, very truly yours,
“H. S. Maine.”
(Sir Henry Sumner Maine.)
“16, George Street, Hanover Square, W.,
“19th December, 1874.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have affixed my name with much satisfaction to this Memorial, and I presume that you intend that men should be in largest number on the list.
“Yours faithfully,
“W. Fergusson.”
(Sir William Fergusson, F.R.S.,
Serjeant-Surgeon to the Queen.)
This Memorial having a certain importance in the history of our movement, I quote the principal paragraphs here:
“The practice of Vivisection has received of recent years enormous extension. Instead of an occasional experiment, made by a man of high scientific attainment, to determine some important problem of physiology, or to test the feasibility of a new surgical operation, it has now become the everyday exercise of hundreds of physiologists and young students of physiology throughout Europe and America. In the latter country, lecturers in most of the schools employ living animals instead of dead for ordinary illustrations, and in Italy one physiologist alone has for some years past experimented on more than 800 dogs annually. A recent correspondence in the Spectator shows that many English physiologists contemplate the indefinite multiplication of such vivisections; some (as Dr. Pye-Smith) defending them as illustrations of lectures, and some (as Mr. Ray-Lankester) frankly avowing that one experiment must lead to another ad infinitum. Every real or supposed discovery of one physiologist immediately causes the repetition of his experiments by scores of students. The most numerous and important of these researches being connected with the nervous system, the use of complete anæsthetics is practically prohibited. Even when employed during an operation, the effect of the anæsthetic of course shortly ceases, and, for the completion of the experiment, the animal is left to suffer the pain of the laceration to which it has been subjected. Another class of experiments consists in superinducing some special disease; such as alcoholism (tried by M. Magnan on dogs at Norwich), and the peculiar malady arising from eating diseased pork (Trichiniasis), superinduced on a number of rabbits in Germany by Dr. Virchow. How far public opinion is becoming deadened to these practices is proved by the frequent recurrence in the newspapers of paragraphs simply alluding to them as matters of scientific interest involving no moral question whatever. One such recently appeared in a highly respectable Review, detailing a French physiologist’s efforts, first to drench the veins of dogs with alcohol, and then to produce spontaneous combustion. Such experiments as these, it is needless to remark, cannot be justified as endeavours to mitigate the sufferings of humanity, and are rather to be characterised as gratifications of the ‘dilettantism of discovery.’
“The recent trial at Norwich has established the fact that, in a public Medical Congress, and sanctioned by a majority of the members, an experiment was tried which has since been formally pronounced by two of the most eminent surgeons in the kingdom to have been ‘cruel and unnecessary.’ We have, therefore, too much reason to fear that in laboratories less exposed to public view, and among inconsiderate young students, very much greater abuses take place which call for repression.
“It is earnestly urged by your Memorialists that the great and influential Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals may see fit to undertake the task (which appears strictly to fall within its province) of placing suitable restrictions on this rapidly increasing evil. The vast benefit to the cause of humanity which the Society has in the past half century effected, would, in our humble estimation, remain altogether one-sided and incomplete; if, while brutal carters and ignorant costermongers are brought to punishment for maltreating the animals under their charge, learned and refined gentlemen should be left unquestioned to inflict far more exquisite pain upon still more sensitive creatures; as if the mere allegation of a scientific purpose removed them above all legal or moral responsibility.
“We therefore beg respectfully to urge on the Committee the immediate adoption of such measures as may approve themselves to their judgment as most suitable to promote the end in view, namely, the Restriction of Vivisection; and we trust that it may not be left to others, who possess neither the wealth or organization of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to make such efforts in the same direction as might prove to be in their power.”
It was arranged that the Memorial should be presented in Jermyn Street in a formal manner on the 25th January, 1875, by a deputation introduced by my cousin’s husband, Mr. John Locke, M.P., Q.C., and consisting of Sir Frederick Elliot, Lord Jocelyn Percy, General G. Lawrence, Mr. R. H. Hutton, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Dr. Walker, Col. Wood (now Sir Evelyn) and several ladies.
Prince Lucian Bonaparte, who always warmly befriended the cause, took the chair at first, and was succeeded by Lord Harrowby, President of the R.S.P.C.A., supported by Lady Burdett Coutts, Lord Mount-Temple (then Mr. Cowper-Temple) and others.
After some friendly discussion it was agreed that the Committee of the R.S.P.C.A. would give the subject their most zealous attention; and a sub-Committee to deal with the matter was accordingly appointed immediately afterwards.
When I drove home to Hereford Square from Jermyn Street that day, I rejoiced to think that I had accomplished a step towards obtaining the protection of the law for the victims of science; and I fully believed that I was free to return to my own literary pursuits and to the journalism which then occupied most of my time. A few days later I was requested to attend (for the occasion only) the first Meeting of the sub-Committee for Vivisection of the R.S.P.C.A. On entering the room my spirits sank, for I saw round the table a number of worthy gentlemen, mostly elderly, but not one of the more distinguished members of their Committee or, (I think), a single Peer or Member of Parliament. In short, they were not the men to take the lead in such a movement and make a bold stand against the claims of science. After a few minutes the Chairman himself asked me: “Whether I could not undertake to get a Bill into Parliament for the object we desired?” As if all my labour with the Memorial had not been spent to make them do this very thing! It was obviously felt by others present that this suggestion was out of place, and I soon retired, leaving the sub-Committee to send Mr. Colam round to make enquiries among the physiologists—a mission which might, perhaps, be represented as a friendly request to be told frankly “whether they were really cruel?” I understood, later, that he was shown a painless vivisection on a cat and offered a glass of sherry; and there (so far as I know or ever heard) the labours of that sub-Committee ended. Mr. Colam afterwards took immense pains to collect evidence from the published works of Vivisectors of the extent and severity of their operations; and this very valuable mass of materials was presented by him some months later to the Royal Commission, and is published in the Blue Book as an Appendix to their Minutes.
I was, of course, miserably disappointed at this stage of affairs, but on the 2nd February, 1875, there appeared in the Morning Post the celebrated letter from Dr. George Hoggan, in which (without naming Claude Bernard) he described what he had himself witnessed in his laboratory when recently working there for several months. This letter was absolutely invaluable to our cause, giving, as it did, reality and firsthand testimony to all we had asserted from books and reports. In the course of it Dr. Hoggan said:—
“I venture to record a little of my own experience in the matter, part of which was gained as an assistant in the laboratory of one of the greatest living experimental physiologists. In that laboratory we sacrificed daily from one to three dogs, besides rabbits and other animals, and after four months’ experience I am of opinion that not one of those experiments on animals was justified or necessary. The idea of the good of humanity was simply out of the question, and would be laughed at, the great aim being to keep up with, or get ahead of, one’s contemporaries in science, even at the price of an incalculable amount of torture needlessly and iniquitously inflicted on the poor animals. During three campaigns I have witnessed many harsh sights, but I think the saddest sight I ever witnessed was when the dogs were brought up from the cellar to the laboratory for sacrifice. Instead of appearing pleased with the change from darkness to light, they seemed seized with horror as soon as they smelt the air of the place, divining, apparently, their approaching fate. They would make friendly advances to each of the three or four persons present, and as far as eyes, ears, and tail could make a mute appeal for mercy eloquent, they tried it in vain.
“Were the feelings of the experimental physiologists not blunted, they could not long continue the practice of vivisection. They are always ready to repudiate any implied want of tender feeling, but I must say that they seldom show much pity; on the contrary, in practice they frequently show the reverse. Hundreds of times I have seen, when an animal writhed with pain and thereby deranged the tissues, during a delicate dissection, instead of being soothed, it would receive a slap and an angry order to be quiet and behave itself. At other times, when an animal had endured great pain for hours without struggling or giving more than an occasional low whine, instead of letting the poor mangled wretch loose to crawl painfully about the place in reserve for another day’s torture, it would receive pity so far that it would be said to have behaved well enough to merit death; and, as a reward, would be killed at once by breaking up the medulla with a needle, or ‘pithing,’ as this operation is called. I have often heard the professor say when one side of an animal had been so mangled and the tissues so obscured by clotted blood that it was difficult to find the part searched for, ‘Why don’t you begin on the other side?’ or ‘Why don’t you take another dog? What is the use of being so economical?’ One of the most revolting features in the laboratory was the custom of giving an animal, on which the professor had completed his experiment, and which had still some life left, to the assistants to practice the finding of arteries, nerves, &c., in the living animal, or for performing what are called fundamental experiments upon it—in other words, repeating those which are recommended in the laboratory hand-books. I am inclined to look upon anæsthetics as the greatest curse to vivisectible animals. They alter too much the normal conditions of life to give accurate results, and they are therefore little depended upon. They, indeed, prove far more efficacious in lulling public feeling towards the vivisectors than pain in the vivisected.”
I had met Dr. Hoggan one day just before this occurrence at Mdme. Bodichon’s house, but I had no idea that he would, or could, bear such valuable testimony; and I have never ceased to feel that in thus nobly coming forward to offer it spontaneously, he struck the greatest blow on our side in the whole battle. Of course I expressed to him all the gratitude I felt, and we thenceforth took counsel frequently as to the policy to be pursued in opposing vivisection.
It soon became evident that if a Bill were to be presented to Parliament that session it must be promoted by some parties other than the Committee of the R.S.P.C.A. Indeed in the following December The Animal World, in a leading article, avowed that “the Royal Society (P.C.A.) is not so entirely unanimous as to desire the passing of any special legislative enactment on this subject” (vivisection). Feeling convinced that some such obstacle was in the way I turned to my friends to see if it might be possible to push on a Bill independently, and with the most kind help of Sir William Hart Dyke (the Conservative whip), it was arranged that a Bill for “Regulating the Practice of Vivisection” should be introduced with the sanction of Government into the House of Lords by Lord Henniker (Lord Hartismere). It is impossible to describe all the anxiety I endured during the interval up to the 4th May, when this Bill was actually presented. Lord Henniker was exceedingly good about it and took much pains with the draft prepared at first by Sir Frederick Elliot, and afterwards completed for Lord Henniker by Mr. Fitzgerald. Lord Coleridge also took great interest in it, and gave most valuable advice, and Mr. Lowe (who afterwards bitterly opposed the almost identical measure of Lord Cross in the Commons), was willing to give this earlier Bill much consideration. I met him one day at luncheon at Airlie Lodge, where were also Lord Henniker, Lady Minto, Lord Airlie and others interested, and the Bill was gone over clause by clause till adjusted to Mr. Lowe’s counsels.
Lord Henniker introduced the Bill thus drafted “for Regulating the Practice of Vivisection” into the House of Lords on the 4th May, 1875; but on the 12th May, to our great surprise another Bill to prevent Abuse in Experiments on Animals was introduced into the House of Commons by Dr. (now Lord) Playfair. On the appearance of this latter Bill, which was understood to be promoted by the physiologists themselves—notably by Dr. Burdon-Sanderson, and by Mr. Charles Darwin—the Government, which had sanctioned Lord Henniker’s Bill, thought it necessary to issue a Royal Commission of Enquiry into the subject before any legislation should be proceeded with. This was done accordingly on the 22nd June, and both Bills were then withdrawn.
The student of this old chapter of the history of the Anti-vivisection Crusade will find both of the above-named Bills (and also the ineffective sketch of what might have been the Bill of the R.S.P.C.A.) in the Appendix to the Report of the Royal Commission, pp. 336–8. Mr. Charles Darwin, in a letter to the Times, April 18th, 1881, said that he “took an active part in trying to get a Bill passed such as would have removed all just cause of complaint, and at the same time have left the physiologists free to pursue their researches,”—a “Bill very different from that which has since been passed.” As Mr. Darwin’s biographer, while reprinting this letter, has not quoted my challenge to him in the Times of the 23rd to point out “in what respect the former Bill is very different from the Act of 1876,” I think it well to cite here the lucid definition of that difference as delineated in the Spectator of May 15th, doubtless by the editor, Mr. Hutton.
“The Vivisection-Restriction Bills.
“On Wednesday afternoon last, Dr. Lyon Playfair laid on the table of the House of Commons a Bill for the Restriction of Vivisection, which has been drawn up by physiologists, no doubt in part, in the interest of physiological science, but also in part, no doubt in the interest of humanity. The contents of this Bill are the best answer which it is possible to give to the ignorant attack made in a daily contemporary on Tuesday on Lord Henniker’s Bill, introduced into the House of Lords last week. The two Bills differ in principle only on one important point. Both of them clearly have been maturely considered by men of science as well as by humanitarians. Both of them assume the great and increasing character of the evil which has to be dealt with. Both of them approach that evil in the same manner, by insisting that scientific experiments which are painful to animals shall be tried only on the avowed responsibility of men of the highest education, whose right to try them may be withdrawn if it be abused. Both of them aim at compelling the physiologists who are permitted to try such experiments at all, to use anæsthetics throughout the experiment, whenever the use of anæsthetics is not fatal to the investigation itself.... The Bills differ, however, on a most important point. It is certain that all the contempt showered on Lord Henniker’s Bill by the ignorant assailants of the humanitarian party might equally have been showered on Dr. Lyon Playfair’s. But Lord Henniker’s Bill contemplates making physiological and pathological experiments on living animals, even under complete anæsthesia, illegal, except under the same responsibility and on the same conditions as those experiments which are not, and cannot be, conducted under complete anæsthesia,—while Dr. Lyon Playfair leaves all experiments conducted under anæsthetics,—and will practically, though not theoretically, leave, we fear, those which only PROFESS to be so conducted (a very different thing),—as utterly without restriction as they now are. Indeed, it attempts no sort of limitation upon them. If a whole hecatomb of guinea-pigs, or even dogs, were known to be imported, and their carcases exported daily from the private house of any man who declared that he always used anæsthetics, Dr. Playfair’s Bill provides, we believe, no sort of machinery by which the truth of his assertion could be even tested.... It is, however, no small matter to have obtained this clear admission on scientific authority that the victimisation of animals in the interest of science is an evil of a growing and serious kind which needs legislative interference, and calls for at least the threat of serious penalties....”
In short, the Bill promoted by the physiologists and Mr. Darwin, was, like the Resolutions of the Liverpool British Association, a “Pious Opinion” or Brutum fulmen. Nothing more.
The Royal Commission on Vivisection was issued, as I have said, on the 22nd June, 1875, and the Report was dated January 8th, 1876. The intervening months were filled with anxiety. I heard constantly all that went on at the Commission, and my hopes and fears rose and fell week by week. Of the constitution of the Commission much might be said. Writing of it in the British Friend, May, 1876, the late Mr. J. B. Firth, M.P., Q.C., remarked:—
“If it were possible for a Royal Commission to be appointed to inquire into the practice of Thuggee, I should have very little confidence in their report if one-third of the Commissioners were prominent practisers of the art. On the same principle the constitution of this Commission is open to the observation that it included two notorious advocates of vivisection, Dr. Erichsen and Professor Huxley, both of whom had to ’explain’ their writings and practices in connection with it, in the course of the inquiry.”
Certain it is, as I heard at the time, and as anyone may verify by looking over the Minutes of Evidence, these two able gentlemen acted, not as Judges on the Bench examining evidence dispassionately, but as exceedingly vigorous and keen-eyed Counsel for the Physiologists. On the humanitarian side there was but a single pronounced opponent of Vivisection,—Mr. R. H. Hutton,—who nobly sacrificed his time for half a year to doing all that was in the power of a single Member of the Commission, and he a layman, to elicit the truth concerning the alleged cruelty of the practice. At the end, after receiving a mass of evidence in answer to 3,764 questions from 53 witnesses, the Commission reported distinctly in favour of legislative interference. They say:—
“Even if the weight of authority on the side of legislative interference had been less considerable, we should have thought ourselves called upon to recommend it by the reason of the thing. It is manifest that the practice is, from its very nature, liable to great abuse, and that since it is impossible for society to entertain the idea of putting an end to it, it ought to be subjected to due regulation and control.... It is not to be doubted that inhumanity may be found in persons of very high position as physiologists.... Beside the cases in which inhumanity exists, we are satisfied that there are others in which carelessness and indifference prevail to an extent sufficient to form a ground for legislative interference.”
Yet in the face of these and other weighty sentences to the same purpose, it has been persistently asserted that the Royal Commission exonerated English physiologists from all charge of cruelty! In Mr. Darwin’s celebrated letter to Professor Holmgren, of Upsala, published in the Times, April, 1881, he said: “The investigation of the matter by a Royal Commission proved that the accusations made against our English physiologists were false.” Commenting on this letter the Spectator, April 23rd, 1881 (doubtless Mr. Hutton himself) observed:
“The Royal Commission did not report this. They came to no such conclusion, and though that may be Mr. Darwin’s own inference from what they did say, it is only his inference, not theirs. In our opinion it was proved that very great cruelty had been practised, with hardly any appreciable results, by more than one British physiologist.”
Nor must it be left out of sight in estimating the disingenuousness of the advocates of vivisection, that the above quoted sentences from the Report of the Commission were countersigned by those representatives of Science, Prof. Huxley and Mr. Erichsen; as were, of course, also the subsequent paragraphs, formally recommending a measure almost identical with Lord Carnarvon’s Bill. In spite of this the Vivisecting clique has not ceased to assert that English physiologists were exculpated, and to protest against the measure which we introduced in strict accordance with that recommendation; a measure which was even still further mitigated, (as regarded freedom to the vivisectors,) under the pressure of their Deputation to the Home Office, till it became the present quasi ineffectual Act.
While the Royal Commission was still sitting in the autumn, and when it had become obvious that much would remain to be done before any effectual check could be placed on Vivisection, Dr. Hoggan suggested to me that we should form a Society to carry on the work. I abhorred Societies, and knew only too well the huge additional labour of working the machinery of one, over and above any direct help to the object in view. I had hitherto worked independently and freely, taking always the advice of the eminent men who were so good as to counsel me at every step. But I felt that this plan could not suffice much longer, and that the authority of a formally constituted Society was needed to make headway against an evil which daily revealed itself as more formidable. Accordingly I agreed with Dr. Hoggan that we should do well to form such a Society, he and I being the Honorary Secretaries, provided we could obtain the countenance of some men of eminence to form the nucleus. “I will write,” I said, “to Lord Shaftesbury and to the Archbishop of York. If they will give me their names, we can conjure with them. If not, I will not undertake to form a Society.”
I wrote that night to those two eminent persons. I received next day from Lord Shaftesbury a telegram (which he must have dispatched instantly on receiving my letter) which answered “Yes.” Next day the post brought from him the letter which I shall here print. The next post brought also the letter from Archbishop Thomson. Thus the Society consisted for two days of Lord Shaftesbury, the Archbishop, Dr. Hoggan and myself!
“Lord Shaftesbury to Miss F. P. C.
“St. Giles’s House, Cranbourne, Salisbury,
“November 17th, 1875.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“It is needful I am sure, to found a Society, in order to have unity and persistency of action.
“I judge, by the terms of the circular, that the object of the Society will be restriction and not prohibition.
“Possibly, this end is as much as you will be able to attain. Prohibition, I doubt not, would be evaded; but restriction will, I am certain, be exceeded.
“Not but that a little is better than nothing.
“But you will find many who will think with much show of reason, that, by surrendering the principle, you have surrendered the great argument.
“Faithfully yours, Shaftesbury.”
“Bishopthorpe, York,
“November 16th, 1875.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I am quite ready to join the Society for restricting Vivisection. I agree with you; total prohibition would be impossible.
“I am, yours very truly,
“W. Ebor.”
With these names to “conjure with,” as I have said, we found it easy to enrol a goodly company in the ranks of our new Society. Cardinal Manning was one of the first to join us. On the 2nd Dec., 1875, the first Committee meeting was held in the house of Dr. and Mrs. Hoggan, 13, Granville Place, Portman Square, Mr. Stansfeld taking the chair. Mrs. Wedgwood, wife of Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood and mother of my friend Miss Julia Wedgwood, was present at that first meeting, and (so long as her health permitted,) at those which followed,—a worthy example of “heredity,” since her father and mother, Sir James and Lady Mackintosh, had been among the principal supporters of Richard Martin, and founders of the R.S.P.C.A. At the third meeting of the Committee, on Feb. 18th, 1876, Lord Shaftesbury took the Chair, for the first time, and again he took it on the occasion of a memorable meeting on the 1st of March, but vacated it on the arrival of Archbishop Thomson, who proved to be an admirably efficient Chairman. We had a serious job, that day; that of discussing the “Statement” of our position and objects. I had drafted this Statement in preparation, as well as compiled from the Minutes of Evidence, a series of Extracts exhibiting the extension and abuses of Vivisection; and also evidence regarding Anæsthetics and regarding foreign physiologists. These appendices were all accepted and appear in the pamphlet; but my Statement was most minutely debated, clause for clause, and at last adopted, not without several modifications. After summarising the Report of the Royal Commission which “has been in some respects seriously misconstrued” (I might add, persistently misconstrued ever since) and also Mr. Hutton’s independent Report, in which he desired that the “Household Animals” should be exempted from Vivisection, the Committee carefully criticise this Report and express their confident hope that “a Bill may be introduced immediately by Government to carry out the recommendations of the Commission.” They observe, in conclusion, that they find “a just summary of their sentiments in Mr. Hutton’s expression of his view:—
“‘The measure will not at all satisfy my own conceptions of the needs of the case, unless it result in putting an end to all experiments involving not merely torture but anything at all approaching thereto.’”
Such was our attitude at that memorable date when we commenced the regular steady work which has now gone on for just 18 years. On the 2nd or 3rd of March I took possession of the offices where so large a part of my life was henceforth to be spent. When my kind colleagues had left me and I locked the outer door of the offices and knew myself to be alone, I resolved very seriously to devote myself, so long as might be needful, to this work of trying to save God’s poor creatures from their intolerable doom; and I resolved “never to go to bed at night leaving a stone unturned which might help to stop Vivisection.” I believe I have kept that resolution. I commend it to other workers.
It may interest the reader to know who were the persons then actually aiding and supporting our movement.
There was,—first and most important,—my colleague and friend Dr. George Hoggan, who laboured incessantly (and wholly gratuitously) for the cause. His wife, Dr. Frances Hoggan, who I am thankful to say, still survives, was also a most useful member of the Committee.
The other Members of the Executive were: Sir Frederick Elliot, K.C.M.G. who had long been Permanent Secretary at the Colonial Office; Major-General Colin Mackenzie, a noble old hero of the Afghan wars and the Mutiny; Mr. Leslie Stephen; Mrs. Hensleigh Wedgwood; Dr. Vaughan (the late Master of the Temple); the Countess of Portsmouth; the Countess of Camperdown; my friend Miss Lloyd; my cousin, Mr. Locke, M.P., Q.C.; Mr. William Shaen; Col. (now Sir Evelyn) Wood; and Mr. Edward de Fonblanque. The latter gentleman was one of the most useful members of the Committee, whose retirement three years later after our adoption of a more advanced policy, I have never ceased to regret.
Beside these Members of the Committee we had then as Vice-Presidents, the Archbishop of York, the Marquis of Bute, Cardinal Manning, Lord Portsmouth, Mr. Cowper-Temple (afterwards Lord Mount-Temple), Right Hon. James Stansfeld, Lord Shaftesbury, the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol (Dr. Ellicott), the Bishop of Manchester (Dr. Fraser), Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, and the Lord Chief Baron, Sir Fitzroy Kelly.
Dr. Hoggan had invited Mr. Spurgeon to join our Society, but received from him the following reply:—
“Rev. C. H. Spurgeon to Dr. Hoggan.
“Nightingale Lane, Clapham,
“Dec. 24th.
“Dear Sir,
“I do not like to become an officer of a Society for I have no time to attend to the duties of such an office, and it strikes me as a false system which is now so general, which allows names to appear on Committees and requires no service from the individuals.
“In all efforts to spare animals from needless pain I wish you the utmost success. There are cases in which they must suffer, as we also must, but not one pang ought to be endured by them from which we can screen them.
“Yours heartily,
“C. H. Spurgeon.
“I shall aid your effort in my own way.”
Mr. Spurgeon wrote on one occasion a letter to Lord Shaftesbury to be read from the Chair at a Meeting; but, much as we wished to use it, the extreme strength of the expletives was considered to transgress the borders of expediency!
We invited Prof. Rolleston to give us his support. The following was his reply:—
“Oxford, Nov. 28th, 1875.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I would have answered your letter before had I been able to make up my mind to do as you ask. This, however, I think I should not, in the interests of the line of legislation which I advocate, do well to do. I believe I speak with greater weight from keeping an independent position. And as I have a great desire to throw away none of the advantages which that position gives me, I am obliged to decline your invitation. Allow me to say that I am much gratified by your writing to ask me to do what I decline to do out of considerations of expediency.
“It is also a great pleasure to me to think that what I said at Bristol has met with your approbation. The bearing of parts at the end or towards the end of that Address upon the future of Vivisection was, I hope, tolerably obvious.
“I am,
“Yours very truly,
“George Rolleston.”
The newly-formed Society had been clumsily named by Dr. Hoggan: “The Society for Protection of Animals liable to Vivisection,” and its aim was: “to obtain the greatest possible protection for animals liable to vivisection.” I was obliged to yield to my colleague as regarded this awkward title which exactly defined the position he desired to take up; but it was a constant source of worry and loss to us. As soon as possible, however, after we had taken our offices in Victoria Street, I called our Society, unofficially and for popular use, simply “The Victoria Street Society.”
These offices are large and handsome, and so conveniently situated that the Society has retained them ever since. They are on the first floor of a house—formerly numbered “1,” now numbered “20,”—in Victoria Street, ten or eleven doors up the street from the Broad Sanctuary and the Westminster Palace Hotel; and with Westminster Abbey and the Towers of the Houses of Parliament in view from the street door. The offices contain an ante-room (now piled with our papers), a large airy room with two windows for the clerks, a Secretary’s private room, and a spacious and lightsome Committee-room with three windows. Out of this last another room was accessible, which at one time was taken for my especial use. I put up bookshelves, pictures, curtains, and various little feminine relaxations, and thus covered, as far as might be, the frightful character of our work, so that friends should find our office no painful place to visit.
We did not let the grass grow under our feet after we had settled down in these offices. On the 20th March there went out from them to the neighbouring Home Office a Deputation to Mr. (now Lord) Cross to urge the Government to bring in a Bill in accordance with the recommendations of the Royal Commission. The Deputation was headed by Lord Shaftesbury, and included the Earl of Minto, Cardinal Manning, Mr. Froude, Mr. Mundella, Sir Frederick Elliot, Col. Evelyn Wood, and Mr. Cowper-Temple. Mr. Carlyle was to have joined the Deputation, but held back sooner than accompany the Cardinal.
Chief Baron Kelly wrote us the following cordial expressions of regret for non-attendance:—
“Western Circuit, Winchester,
“4th March, 1876.
“The Lord Chief Baron presents his compliments to Miss Cobbe, and very greatly regrets that, being engaged at the assize on the Western Circuit until nearly the middle of April, he will be unable to accompany the deputation to Mr. Cross on the subject of Vivisection, to which, however, he earnestly wishes success.”
We had invited Canon Liddon, who was a subscriber to our funds from the first, to join this Deputation, but received from him the following reply:
“Amen Court, 6th March, 1876.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I should be sincerely glad to be able to obey your kind wishes in the matter of the proposed Deputation, if I could. But I am unable to be in London again between to-morrow and April 1st, and this, I fear will make it impossible.
“I shall be sincerely glad to hear that the Deputation succeeds in persuading the Home Secretary to make legislation on the Report of the Vivisection Commission a Government question. Mr. Hutton appeared to me to resist the —— criticisms of the Times on the Report very admirably!
“Thanking you for your note,
“I am, my dear Miss Cobbe,
“Yours very truly,
“H. P. Liddon.”
A few weeks afterwards when I invited him to attend a meeting he wrote again a letter, to the last sentence of which I desire to call attention as embodying the opinion of this eminent man on the human moral interest involved in our crusade.
“Christ Church, Oxford,
“May 22nd, 1876.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I sincerely wish that I could obey your summons. But, as a professor here, I have public duties on Thursday, the 1st of June, which I cannot decline or transfer to other hands.
“I think I told you I was a useless person for these good purposes; and so, you see, it is.
“Still you are very well off in the way of speakers, and will not miss such a person as I. Heartily do I hope that the meeting may reward the trouble you have taken about it by strengthening Lord Carnarvon’s hands. The cause you have at heart is of even greater importance to human character than to the physical comfort of those of our ‘fellow creatures’ who are most immediately concerned.
“I am, my dear Miss Cobbe,
“Yours very truly,
“H. P. Liddon.”
The Deputation of March 20th to the Home Office was most favourably received, and our Society was invited to submit to Government suggestions respecting the provisions of the intended Bill. These suggestions were framed at a Committee held at our office on the 30th March, and they were adopted by Government after being approved by its official advisers, and presented by Lord Carnarvon in the House of Lords. The second reading took place on the 22nd May. On that occasion Lord Coleridge made a most judicious speech in defence of the Bill, and Lord Shaftesbury the long and beautiful one reprinted in our pamphlet, “In Memoriam.” The next morning all the newspapers came out with leading articles in praise of the Bill. It is hard now to realise that, previous to undergoing the medical pressure which has twisted the minds—(or at least the pens)—of three-fourths of the press, even the great paper which has been our relentless opponent for 17 years was then our cordial supporter. Everything at that time looked fair for us. The Bill, as we had drafted it, did, practically, fulfil Mr. Hutton’s aspiration. No experiment whatever under any circumstances was permitted on a dog, cat, horse, ass, or mule; nor any on any other animal except under conditions of complete anæsthesia from beginning to end. The Bill included Licenses, but no Certificates dispensing with the above provisions. Our hopes of carrying this bill seemed amply justified by the reception it received from the House of Lords and the Press; and from a great Conference of the R.S.P.C.A. and its branches, held on the 23rd May. We held our first General Meeting at Westminster Palace Hotel on the 1st June and resolutions in support of the Bill were passed enthusiastically; Lord Shaftesbury presiding, and the Marquis of Bute, Lord Glasgow, Cardinal Manning and others speaking with great spirit. It only needed, to all appearance, that the Bill should be pushed through its final stage in the Lords and sent down to the House of Commons, to secure its passage intact that same Session.
At this most critical moment, and through the whole month of June, Lord Carnarvon, in whose hands the Bill lay, was drawn away from London and occupied by the illness and death of Lady Carnarvon. No words can tell the anxiety and alarm this occasioned us, when we learned that a large section of the medical profession, which had so far seemed quiescent if not approving, had been roused by their chief wire-puller into a state of exasperation at the supposed “insult” of proposing to submit them to legal control in experimenting on living animals, (as they were already subjected to it, by the Anatomy Act, in dissecting dead bodies). These doctors, to the number of 3,000, signed a Memorial to the Home Secretary, calling on him to modify the Bill so as practically to reverse its character, and make it a measure, no longer protecting vivisected animals from torture, but vivisectors from prosecution under Martin’s Act. This Memorial was presented on the 10th July by a Deputation, variously estimated at 300 and at 800 doctors, who, in either case, were sufficiently numerous to overflow the purlieus of the Home Office and to overawe Mr. Cross. On the 10th of August the Bill—essentially altered in submission to the medical memorialists—was brought by Mr. Cross into the House of Commons, and was read a second time. On the 15th August, 1876, it received the Royal Assent and became the Act 39–40 Vict., c. 77, commonly called the “Vivisection Act.”
The world has never seemed to me quite the same since that dreadful time. My hopes had been raised so high to be dashed so low as even to make me fear that I had done harm instead of good, and brought fresh danger to the hapless brutes for whose sake, as I realised more and more their agonies, I would have gladly died. I was baffled in an aim nearer to my heart than any other had ever been, and for which I had strained every nerve for many months; and of all the hundreds of people who had seemed to sympathise and had signed our Memorials and petitions, there were none to say: “This shall not be!” Justice and Mercy seemed to have gone from the earth.
We left London,—the Session and the summer being over, and came as usual to Wales; but our enjoyment of the beauty of this lovely land had in great measure vanished. Even after twenty years my friend and I look back to our joyous summers before that miserable one, and say, “Ah! that was when we knew very little of Vivisection.”
In my despair I wrote several letters of bitter reproach to the friends in Parliament who had allowed our Bill to be so mutilated as that the British Medical Journal crowed over it, as affording full liberty to “science”; and I also wrote to several newspapers saying that after this failure to obtain a reasonable restrictive Bill, I, for one, should labour henceforth to obtain total prohibition. In reply to my letter (I fear a very petulant one) Lord Shaftesbury wrote me this full and important explanation which I commend to the careful reading of such of our friends as desire now to rescind the Act of 1876.
“Castle Wemyss, Wemyss Bay, N.B.,
“Aug. 16th, 1876.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“Until we shall have seen the Act in print we cannot form a just estimate of the force of the amendments. Some few, so I see by the papers, were introduced in Committee, after my last interview with Mr. Cross; but of their character I know nothing. I am disposed, however, to believe that he would not have admitted anything of real importance.
“Mr. Cross’s difficulties were very great at all times; but they increased much as the Session was drawing to a close. The want of time, the extreme pressure of business, the active malignity of the Scientific men, and the indifference of his Colleagues, left the Secretary of State in a very weak and embarrassing position.
“Your letter, which I have just received, asks whether ‘the Bill cannot be turned out in the House of Lords?’ The reply is that, whether advisable or unadvisable, it cannot now be done, for the Parliament is prorogued.
“In the Bill as submitted to me, just before the second reading at a final interview with Mr. Cross, Mr. Holt and Lord Cardwell being present, some changes were made which I by no means approved. But the question, then, was simply, ‘The Bill as propounded, or no Bill,’ for Mr. Cross stoutly maintained that, without the alterations suggested, he had no hope of carrying anything at all. I reverted, therefore, to my first opinion, stated at the very commencement of my co-operation with your Committee, that it was of great importance, nay indispensable, to obtain a Bill, however imperfect, which should condemn the practice, put a limit on the exercise of it, and give us a foundation on which to build amendments hereafter as evidence and opportunity shall be offered to us.
“The Bill is of that character. I apprehended that if there were no Bill then, there would be none at any time. No private Member, I believe, and I still believe, could undertake such a measure with even a shadow of hope and there was more than doubt, whether a Secretary of State would, again, entangle himself with so bitter and so wearisome a question in the face of all Science, and the antipathies of most of his Colleagues. Public sympathy would have declined, and would not have easily been aroused a second time. The public sympathy at its best, was only noisy, and not effective; and this assertion is proved by the few signatures to petitions, compared with the professed feeling; and by the extreme difficulty to raise any funds in proportion to the exigency of the case.
“The evidence, too, given to the Commission, which was, after all, our main reliance, would have grown stale; and, the Physiologists would have taken good care that, for some time at least, nothing should transpire to take its place.
“We have gained an enactment that Experiments shall be performed by none but Licensed Persons, thereby excluding, should the Act be well enforced, the host of young students and their bed-chamber practices.
“We have gained an enactment that all experiments shall be performed under the influence of Anæsthetics;33 and, thirdly, the greatest enactment of all, that the Secretary of State is responsible for the due execution of all these provisions in Parliament, and in his Office, instead of the College of Physicians, or some such unreachable, and intangible Body, as many Secretaries of State, except Mr. Cross, would have evasively, appointed.
“This provision under the Statutes, so unexpected, and valuable, could have been suggested to Parliament by a Secretary of State only, and I feel sure that no Secretary of State in any ‘Liberal’ Administration would listen to the proposal; and I very much doubt whether Mr. Cross himself, had his present Bill been rejected, would have, in the case of a new Bill, repeated his offer of making it a measure for which the Cabinet has to answer.
“I have seen your letter to the Echo and the Daily News. You are quite justified in your determination to agitate the country on the subject of vivisection, and obtain, if it be possible, the total abolition of it. Such an issue may be within reach, and it is only by experience that we can ascertain how far such a blessed consummation is practicable. You will have a good deal of sympathy with your efforts, and from no one more than from myself.
“Yours truly,
“Shaftesbury.”
When we all returned to town in October, the Committee placed on the Minutes a letter from me, saying that I could only retain the office of Honorary Secretary if the Society should adopt the principle of total prohibition. A circular was sent out calling for votes on the point, and by the 22nd November, 1876, the Resolution was carried, “That the Society would watch the existing Act with a view to the enforcement of its restrictions and its extension to the total prohibition of painful experiments on animals.”
In February, 1877, the Committee, to my satisfaction, unanimously agreed to support Mr. Holt’s Bill for total prohibition; and in aid thereof exhibited on the hoardings of London 1,700 handbills and 300 posters, which were enlarged reproductions of the illustrations of vivisection from the Physiological Hand-books. These posters certainly were more effective than as many thousands of speeches and pamphlets; and the indignation of the scientific party sufficiently proved that such was the case. On the 27th April we held our second annual meeting in support of Mr. Holt’s Bill, and had for speakers Lord Shaftesbury, the good Bishop of Winchester Dr. Harold-Browne, (now, alas! dead), Lord Mount-Temple, Prof. Sheldon Amos, Cardinal Manning, and Prince Lucien Bonaparte. The last remarkable man and erudite scholar (who most closely resembled his uncle in person, if we could imagine Napoleon I. commanding only armies of books!), was, from first to last, a warm friend of our cause. After this meeting we elected him Vice-President and here is his letter of acknowledgment:—
“Prince Lucien Bonaparte to Miss F. P. C.
“6, Norfolk Terrace, Bayswater,
“4th May, 1877.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I feel highly honoured at being nominated one of the Vice-Presidents of the Society for Protection of Animals liable to vivisection, and ask you to return the Committee my best thanks.
“I am a great admirer of a Society which, like yours, opposes so strongly the abominable practice of vivisection, because for my own part, I consider it, even in its mildest form, as a shame to Science, a dishonour to modern civilisation, and (what I think more important) a great offence against the law of God.
“Believe me, my dear Miss Cobbe,
“Yours very sincerely,
“L. Bonaparte.”
Here are some further letters concerned with that meeting or written to me soon afterwards:—
“Christ Church, Oxford,
“March 26th, 1877.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I beg to thank you sincerely for your kind letter.
“So far as I can see there is, I fear, little chance of my being at liberty to take part in the proceedings on the 27th of April.
“However, with the names which you announce, you will be more than able to dispense with any assistance that I could lend to the common object. You will, I trust, be able to strengthen Mr. Holt’s hands. If what I have heard of his measure is at all accurate, it seems to be at once moderate and efficient.
“I was much struck by an observation which you were, I think, said to have made the other day at Bristol, to the effect that as matters now stand everything depends upon the discretion, or rather, upon the moral sympathies of the Home Secretary. Mr. Cross, I believe, would always do well in all such matters. But it does not do to reckon with the Roman Empire as if it were always to be governed by a Marcus Aurelius.
“I am, my dear Miss Cobbe,
“Yours very truly,
“H. P. Liddon.”
“House of Commons,
“26th March.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I am sorry I cannot undertake to speak at your meeting on the 27th April. I am not sure that I shall be in London on that day, but request you to send me any notice of the meeting.
“My time and strength are somewhat overtaxed owing to an inability, and I may add indisposition, to say No when I think I may be useful. I am, however, I can assure you, in sympathy with you in your attempt to put down torture in every form.
“I am, yours very sincerely,
“S. Morley.”
(Samuel Morley, M.P.)
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I will come in at some stage of your proceedings. I am bound first to Convocation—and am engaged at Kingston before 5.
“What I should like would be to thank Lord Shaftesbury; but this must depend on the time that I come, and that must depend on the exigencies of Convocation.
“Yours truly,
“A. P. Stanley.
(The Dean of Westminster.)
“April 25th, 1877.”
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I am very sorry that through absence from home my answer to your note has been delayed. I shall not be able to take part in your meeting on the 27th, for I am not in a state of health to take part in any public meeting; but if I am at all able I should like much to attend it and hear for myself the views of the speakers. I have not expressed publicly any opinion on the question of Vivisection, being anxious at first to await the determination of the Commission, and then to see how the restrictions were likely to work.
“I confess that my own mind is leaning very strongly to the conclusion that there is no safe, right course other than entire prohibition. The more I think of it the more I dread the brutality which in spite of the influence of the best men will inevitably be developed in our young Experimenters, in these days of almost fanatical devotion to scientific research. It seems to me to more than counterbalance the physical advantages to our sick what may grow out of the practice of vivisection.
“And I am very sceptical about these physical advantages. I doubt whether the secrets of nature can be successfully discovered by torture, any more than the secrets of hearts. We have abandoned the one endeavour, finding the results to be by no means worth the cost. I am persuaded that we shall soon, for the same reason, have to abandon the other.
“I am not able, as I say, to take part in a meeting, but as soon as I am able I intend to preach on the subject, and if you can forward to me any information which will be useful I shall be much obliged to you. Believe me
“Ever my dear Miss Cobbe,
“Yours very faithfully,
“J. Baldwin Brown.”
(Rev. J. B. Brown.)
By this time there were two other Anti-vivisection Societies in London, beside Mr. Jesse’s Society at Macclesfield, all working for total prohibition; and though of course we had various small difficulties and rivalries in the course of time, yet practically we all helped each other and the cause. Eventually the International Society, of which Mr. and Mrs. Adlam were the spirited leaders, coalesced with ours and added to our Committee several of its most valuable members including our present much respected Chairman, Mr. Ernest Bell. The London Anti-vivisection Society, though I expended all my blandishments on it, has never consented to amalgamation, but has done a great work of its own for which we have all reason to hold it in honour.
The revolt against the cruelties of science spread also about this time to the continent. Baron Weber read his Torture Chamber of Science in Dresden, and created thereby a great sensation, followed by the formation of the German League, of which he is President, and the foundation of its organ, the Thier-und-Menschen-Freund, edited by Dr. Paul Förster, now a member of the Reichstag. Other Anti-vivisection Societies were founded then or in subsequent years in Hanover, in Berlin, and in Stockholm. In Copenhagen those devoted friends of animals, M. and Mdme. Lembcké, had long contended vigorously against the local vivisector, Panum. In Italy the Florence Società Protettrice, of which our Queen is Patroness and Countess Baldelli the indefatigable Hon. Sec., has steadily worked against vivisection from its foundation; and so has the Torinese Society of which Dr. Riboli is President and Countess Biandrate Morelli the leading member. In Riga there has also been a persevering movement against Vivisection by the excellent Society of which the Anwalt der Thiere is the (first-class) organ, and Madame V. Schilling the presiding spirit.
In short, by the end of the decade, though we had been so cruelly defeated, we were conscious that our movement had extended and had become to all appearance one of those permanent agitations, which, once begun, go on till the abuses which aroused them are abolished. In America the movement only took definite shape in February, 1883, when, under the auspices of the indefatigable Mrs. White, the American Anti-vivisection Society was founded at Philadelphia; to be followed up by its most flourishing Illinois Branch, carried on with immense spirit by Mrs. Fairchild Allen. Mr. Peabody and Mr. Greene have since established at Boston the New England Anti-vivisection Society, which has already become one of our most powerful allies.
On the 2nd May, Mr. Holt’s Bill for total prohibition was debated in the House of Commons, and on a division there were 83 votes in its favour and 222 against it.
At last the Committee of the Victoria Street Society formally adopted the thoroughgoing policy; and at a Meeting, August 7th, 1878, resolved “to appeal henceforth to public opinion in favour of the total prohibition of Vivisection.” We then changed our title to that of the Society for Protection of Animals from Vivisection. Dr. Hoggan and his wife, Mrs. Hoggan, M.D., and also Mr. de Fonblanque retired from the Committee with cordial goodwill on both sides, and the Archbishop of York withdrew from the Vice-Presidency. But, beside these losses, I do not believe that we had any others, and there was soon a large batch of fresh recruits of new Members who had long resented our previous half-hearted policy,—as they considered it to have been.
For my own part I had accepted from the outset the assurance I received on all hands that a Bill for the total prohibition of Vivisection had not the remotest chance of passing through Parliament in the present state of public opinion; but that a Bill might be framed, which, proceeding only on the grounds of Restriction, might effectually and thoroughly exclude “not only torture but anything at all approaching thereto”; and that such a Bill had every chance of becoming law. To promote such a Bill had been my single aim and hope, and when it had been prepared and presented and received so favourably, it really appeared as if we were on the right and reasonable tack; much as we hated any concession whatever to the demands of the vivisectors.
But when we found that the compromise which we proposed had failed, and that our Bill providing the minimum of protection for animals at all acceptable by their friends, was twisted into a Bill protecting their tormentors, we were driven to raise our demands to the total prohibition of the practice, and to determine to work upon that basis for any number of years till public opinion be ripe for our measure.
This was one aspect of our position; but there was another. We had in truth gone into this crusade almost as our forefathers had set off for the Holy Land, with scarcely any knowledge of the Power which we were invading. We knew that dreadful cruelties had been done; but we fondly imagined they were abuses which were separable from the practice of experimenting on living animals. We accepted blindly the representation of Vivisection by its advocates as a rare resource of baffled surgeons and physicians, intent on some discovery for the immediate benefit of humanity or the solution of some pressing and important physiological problem; and we thought that with due and well considered restrictions and safeguards on these occasional experiments, we might effectually shut out cruelty. By slow, very slow degrees, we learned that nothing was much further from the truth than these fancy pictures of ideal Vivisection, and that real Vivisection is not the occasional and regretfully-adopted resource of a few, but the daily employment (Carl Vogt called it his “daily bread”) of hundreds of men and students, devoted to it as completely and professionally as butchers to cutting up carcases. Finally we found that to extend protection by any conceivable Act of Parliament to animals once delivered to the physiologists in their laboratories, was chimerical. Vivisection, we recognized at last to be a Method of Research which may be either sanctioned or prohibited as a Method, but which cannot be restricted efficiently by rules founded on humane considerations wholly irrelevant to the scientific enquiry.
On the moral side also, we became profoundly impressed with the truth of the principle to which Canon Liddon refers in the letter I have quoted, viz., that the Anti-Vivisection cause is “of even greater importance to human character than to the physical comfort of our fellow-creatures who are most immediately concerned.” As I wrote of it, about this time in Bernard’s Martyrs:—
“We stand face to face with a New Vice, new, at least in its vast modern development and the passion wherewith it is pursued—the Vice of Scientific Cruelty. It is not the old vice of Cruelty for Cruelty’s sake. It is not the careless brutal cruelty of the half-savage drunken drover, the low ruffian who skins living cats for gain, or of the classic Roman or modern Spaniard, watching the sports of the arena with fierce delight in the sight of blood and death. The new vice is nothing of this kind.... It is not like most other human vices, hot and thoughtless. The man possessed by it is calm, cool, deliberate; perfectly cognisant of what he is doing; understanding, as indeed no other man understands, the full meaning and extent of the waves and spasms of agony he deliberately creates. It does not seize the ignorant or hunger-driven or brutalized classes; but the cultivated, the well-fed, the well-dressed, the civilized, and (it is said) the otherwise kindly disposed and genial men of science, forming part of the most intellectual circles in Europe. Sometimes it would appear as we read of these horrors,—the baking alive of dogs, the slow dissecting out of quivering nerves, and so on,—that it would be a relief to picture the doer of such deeds as some unhappy, half-witted wretch, hideous and filthy in mien or stupified by drink, so that the full responsibility of a rational and educated human being should not belong to him, and that we might say of him, ‘He scarcely understands what he does.’ But, alas! this New Vice has no such palliations; and is exhibited not by such unhappy outcasts, but by some of the very foremost men of our time; men who would think scornfully of being asked to share the butcher’s honest trade: men addicted to high speculation on all the mysteries of the universe; men who hope to found the Religion of the Future, and to leave the impress of their minds upon their age, and upon generations yet to be born.”
Regarding the matter from this point of view,—as our leaders, the most eminent philanthropists of their generation, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Mount-Temple, Samuel Morley, and Cardinal Manning, emphatically did,—the reasons for calling for the total Prohibition of Vivisection rather than for its Restriction became actually clearer in our eyes on the side of the human moral interests than on that of the physical interests of the poor brutes. We felt that so long as the practice should be sanctioned at all, so long the Vice of Scientific Cruelty would spring up in the fresh minds of students, and be kept alive everywhere. It was therefore absolutely needful to reach the germ of the disease, and not merely to endeavour to allay the worst symptoms and outbreaks. It is the passion itself which needs to be sternly suppressed; and this can only be done by stopping altogether the practice which is its outcome, and on which it feeds and grows.
But (say our opponents), “Are you prepared to relinquish all the benefits which this practice brings to humanity at large?”
Our answer to them, of course, is, that we question the reality of those benefits altogether, but that, placing them at their highest estimation, they are of no appreciable weight compared to the certain moral injury done to the community by the sanction of cruelty. The discovery of the Elixir Vitæ itself would be too dearly purchased if the hearts of men were to be rendered one degree more callous and selfish than they are now. And that the practice of vivisection by a body of men at the intellectual summit of our social system, whose influence must dribble down through every stratum of society, would infallibly tend to increase such callousness, there can exist no reasonable doubt. For my own part, though believing that little or nothing worth mentioning has been discovered for the Healing Art through Vivisection, and that Dr. Leffingwell is right in saying that “if agony could be measured in money, no Mining Company in the world would sanction prospecting in such barren regions,” I yet deprecate the emphasis which many of our friends have laid on this argument against vivisection. We have gone off our rightful ground of the simple moral issues of the question and have seemed to admit (what very few of us would deliberately do) that if some important discovery had been made by Vivisection, our case against it would be lost or weakened. I have been so anxious to warn our friends against this, as I think, very grave mistake in tactics, that I circulated some time ago a little Parable which I may as well summarize here:—
“A party of Filibusters once proposed to ravage a neighbouring island, inhabited by poor and humble people who had always been faithful servants and friends of our country, and had in no way deserved ill-treatment. Some friends of justice protested that the Filibusters ought to be prohibited from carrying on their expedition, but unluckily they did not simply arraign the moral lawfulness of the project, but went on to discuss the inexpediency of the invasion, arguing that the island was very poor and barren, and would not repay the cost of conquest. Here the Filibusters saw their advantage and broke in: ‘No such thing! We are the only people who know anything about the island, and we assure you it is full of mines of gold and silver.’ ‘Bosh!’ replied the just men; ‘we defy you to show us a single nugget.’ On this there was a good deal of shuffling of feet among the Filibusters, and they exhibited some glittering fragments as gold, but being tested these proved to be worthless, and again other fragments which they produced were traced to quite another part of the district, far away from the island. Still it became evident that the Filibusters would go on interminably bringing up specimens, and some day might possibly produce one the value of which could not be well disputed. Moreover the Filibusters (who, like other pirates, were addicted to telling fearful yarns) had the great advantage of talking all along of things they had studied and seen, whereas the men of the party of justice were imperfectly informed about the resources of the island, having never gone thither, and thus they were easily placed at a disadvantage and made to appear foolish. It is true that the Filibusters had set them on the wrong track by clamouring for the invasion on the avowed ground of the spoil they should gather for the nation, and they had only tried to nullify the effect of such appeals to general selfishness by showing that there was really no spoil to be had; and that the invasion was a blunder as well as a crime. But in bandying such appeals to expediency they had put themselves in the wrong box; because to discuss the value of the spoil was, by implication to admit that, if it only were rich, it might possibly be justifiable to go and seize it!”
I have made this long explanation of our policy, because I am painfully aware that among practical people and men of the world, accustomed to compromise on public questions, our adoption of the demand for total prohibition has placed us at a great disadvantage as “irreconcilables;” and our movement has appeared as the “fad” of enthusiasts and fanatics. For the reasons I have given above I think it will appear that while compromise offered any hope of protecting our poor clients from the very worst cruelties, we tried it frankly and in earnest; first in Lord Henniker’s and secondly in Lord Carnarvon’s Bill. When this last effort failed we were left no choice but either to abandon our dumb friends to their fate, or demand for them the removal of the source of their danger.
It will not be necessary for me to recount further with as much detail the history of the Victoria Street Society, of which I continued to act as Hon. Secretary till I finally left London in 1884. Abundance of other friends of animals, active and energetic, were in the field, and our movement, in spite of a score of checks and defeats, continued to spread and deepen. Campbell’s familiar line often occurred to me (with a variation)—
“The cause of Mercy once begun,
Though often lost is always won!”
On July 15th, 1879, Lord Truro brought into the House of Lords a Bill for the Prohibition of Vivisection. It was not promoted by us, and was in many respects unfortunately managed, but our Society, of course, supported it, Lord Shaftesbury made in defence of it one of his longest speeches. I was in the House of Lords at the time, and thought that there could never be a much more affecting sight than that of the noble old man, who had pleaded so often in that “gilded chamber” for men, women and children, standing there at last in his venerable age, urging with all his simple eloquence the claims of dumb animals to mercy. Against him rose and spoke Lord Aberdare, actually (as he took pains to explain) as President of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals! The Bishop of Peterborough, Dr. Magee, afterwards Archbishop of York, also made then his unhappy speech about the rabbits and the surgical operation; (with which the inventor of that operation, Dr. Clay, said they had “no more to do than the Pope of Rome”). Only 16 Peers voted for the Bill, 97 against it.
On the 16th March, 1880, Mr. Holt’s Bill for total prohibition was down for second reading in the House of Commons, but was stopped by notice of dissolution. From that time our friend, Sir Eardley Wilmot, took charge of a similar Bill promoted by our Society. Notice of it was given by Mr. Firth on the 3rd February, 1881. The second reading was postponed, first to July 13th, next to July 27th, and then that day was taken by government. In October of that year (1881) Mr. R. T. Reid took charge of our Bill, on the resignation of Sir Eardley Wilmot. The second reading was postponed on June 28th, 1882, and not till the 4th of April, 1883, after all these heart-breaking postponements and failures, there was at last a Debate. Mr. Reid and Mr. George Russell spoke admirably in favour of the Bill, but they were talked out without a division by a whole series of advocates of vivisection, of whom Sir William Harcourt, Mr. Cartwright, and Lord Playfair, were most eminent. This was the last occasion on which we have been able to obtain a debate in either House. Mr. Reid brought in his Bill again in 1884, but could obtain no day for a second reading.
One touching incident of these earlier years I must not omit. Our Hon. Correspondent at the Hague, Madame van Manen-Thesingh, had written me several letters exhibiting remarkable good sense as well as ardent feeling. One day I received a short note from her telling me that she was dying; and begging me to send over some trustworthy agent at once to the Hague, if, (as she feared) I could not go to her myself. I telegraphed that I would be with her next day, and accordingly sailed that night to Flushing. When I reached her house M. van Manen received me very kindly; but as a man half bewildered with grief. His wife’s disease was cancer of the tongue, and she could no longer speak. She was waiting for me in her drawing-room. It may be imagined how affecting was our half-speechless interview. After a time M. van Manen, at a sign from his wife, unlocked a bureau and took out a large packet of papers. These he placed before her on the table and then left the room. Of course I understood this proceeding was intended to satisfy me that it was with her husband’s entire consent that Madame van Manen gave these papers to me. There were a great many of them, Dutch, Russian, and American securities of one sort or another, and she marked them off one by one on a list which she had prepared. Then she wrote down that she gave me all these, and also some laces and jewellery, to further the Anti-vivisection cause in whatever way I thought best; reserving a donation for the London Anti-vivisection Society. A few efforts to convey my gratitude and sympathy were all I could make. The dear, noble woman stood calm and brave in the immediate prospect of death in its most painful form, and all her anxiety seemed to be that the poor brutes should be effectually aided by her gifts. I left her sorrowfully, and carried her parcel in my travelling bag, first to Amsterdam for a day or two, and then to London, where having summoned our Finance Committee, I placed it in their hands. The contents (duly estimated and sold through the Army and Navy Society) realised (over and above the legacy to the London Society) about £1,350. With this sum we started the Zoophilist.
The Zoophilist thus founded (May 2nd, 1881) under the editorship of Mr. Adams, then our Secretary, has of course been of enormous value to our cause. A new series began on the 1st January, 1883, which I edited till my resignation of the Hon. Secretaryship June, 1884. I also started and edited a French journal of the same size and character, Le Zoophile, from November 1st, 1883, to April, 1884, when the undertaking was abandoned, French readers having obviously found the paper too dry for their taste. Some of them also remonstrated with me against the occasional references in it to religious considerations, and I was frankly counselled by a very influential French gentleman to cease altogether to mention God,—a piece of advice which I distinctly declined to take! The late celebrated Mdlle. Deraismes sent me a beautiful article for Le Zoophile, of which I should have gladly availed myself if she would have allowed me the editorial privilege of dropping about half a page of aggressive atheism; but this, after a pretty sharp correspondence, she refused peremptorily to do. Altogether I was evidently out of touch both with my French staff and French readers.
Beside these two periodicals our Society from the first issued an almost incredible multitude of pamphlets and leaflets. I should be afraid to make any calculation of the number of them and of the thousands of copies sent into circulation. My own share must have exceeded four hundred. Beside these and those of our successive Secretaries (some extremely able) we printed valuable pamphlets, Sermons and Speeches by Lord Shaftesbury, Cardinal Manning, the Lord Chief Justice, the Dean of Llandaff, Professor Ruskin, Bishop Barry, Mr. R. T. Reid, Hon. B. Coleridge, Lady Paget, Canon Wilberforce, Mr. Mark Thornhill, Mr. Leslie Stephen, the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Mackarness), Rev. F. O. Morris, Dr. Arnold, George Macdonald, Mr. Ernest Bell, Baron Weber, and (above all for scientific importance) Mr. Lawson Tait, Dr. Bell Taylor, Dr. Berdoe, and Dr. Clarke.
Some of my own Anti-vivisection pamphlets were collected a few years ago and published by Messrs. Sonnenschein in a volume (crown 8vo., pp. 272) entitled the Modern Rack. Several very useful books of reference were compiled by our Secretary, Mr. Bryan, and published by the Society; notably the Vivisectors’ Directory, the English Vivisectors’ Directory, and Anti-vivisection Evidences. Of the Nine Circles, compiled for me and printed (first edition) at my expense, I shall speak presently.
I must here be allowed to say that the spirited letters, pamphlets and articles by our medical allies, Dr. Berdoe, Dr. Clarke, Dr. Bowie and Dr. Arnold,—above all Dr. Berdoe’s contributions to our scientific literature, have been an immeasurable value to our cause. The day of Dr. Berdoe’s accession to our party at one of our annual meetings must ever be remembered by me with gratitude. His ability, courage and disinterestedness have been far beyond any praise I can give them. Mr. Mark Thornhill also (a distinguished Indian Civil Servant, author of The Indian Mutiny, etc.), has done us invaluable service by his calm, lucid and most convincing writings, notably “The Case against Vivisection,” and “Experiments on Hospital Patients.” Mr. Pirkis, R.N., has been for many years not only by his steady attendance at the Committee but by his unwearied exertions in preparing and disseminating anti-Pasteur literature, one of the chief benefactors of the Society.
Among our undertakings on behalf of the victims of science was the prosecution of Prof. Ferrier at Bow Street on the 17th November, 1881, on the strength of certain reports in the two leading Medical Journals. We had ascertained that he had no license for Vivisection and yet we read as follows in a report of the proceedings at the International Medical Congress of 1881:—
“The members were shown two of the monkeys, a portion of whose cortex had been removed by Professor Ferrier.”—British Medical Journal, 20th August, 1881.
“The interest attaching to the discussion was greatly enhanced by the fact that Professor Ferrier was willing to exhibit two monkeys which he had operated upon some months previously....
“In startling contrast to the dog were two monkeys exhibited by Professor Ferrier. One of them had been operated upon in the middle of January, the left motor area having been destroyed.”—Lancet, October 8th, 1881.
When the reporters who had sent in their reports to the two journals were produced, the following ludicrous examination took place in court:—
Dr. Charles Smart Roy (the Reporter for the British Medical Journal) was asked—
“Q. Did Professor Ferrier offer to exhibit two of the monkeys upon which he had so operated?
“A. At the Congress, no.
“Q. Did he subsequently?
“A. No; he showed certain of the members of the Congress two monkeys at King’s College.
“Q. What two monkeys?
“A. Two monkeys upon which an operation had been performed.
“Q. By whom?
“A. By Professor Yeo” (!!)
The Editor of the Lancet, Dr. Wakeley, was next examined:—
Dr. Wakeley, sworn, examined by Mr. Waddy:—
“Q. Are you the Editor of the Lancet?
“A. I am.
“Q. Can you tell me who it was furnished his Report?
“A. I have the permission of the gentleman to give his name, Professor Gamgee, of Owen’s College, Manchester.
“Mr. Waddy: What I should ask is that one might have an opportunity of calling Professor Gamgee.
“Mr. Gully (Counsel for the defendant): We have communicated with Professor Gamgee, and I know very well he will say precisely what was said by Dr. Roy.”
—Report of Trial, November 17th, 1881.
The position of the Anti-vivisectionists on the occasion was, it must be confessed, like that of the simple countryman in the fair. “You lay your money that Professor Ferrier is under that cup?” “Yes, certainly! I saw both Professor Roy and Professor Gamgee put him there about five minutes ago.” “Here then, see! Hay Presto! Hocus-pocus! There is only Professor Yeo!”
The group of Vivisectors and their allies, Dr. Michael Foster, Dr. Burdon-Sanderson, Dr. Ernest Hart, Prof. Ferrier, Dr. Roy and many more who filled the court, all evinced the utmost hilarity at the success of the device whereby (as a matter of necessity) the Anti-vivisection case collapsed.
At last, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1884, the truth came to light. In the Prefatory Note to a record of Experiments by David Ferrier and Gerald F. Yeo, M.D., occurs the statement:—
“The facts recorded in this paper are partly the results of a research made conjointly by Drs. Ferrier and Yeo, aided by a grant from the British Medical Association, and partly of a research made by Dr. Ferrier alone, aided by a grant from the Royal Society.”
The conjoint experiences are distinguished by an asterisk; and among them we find those of the two monkeys which formed the subject of the trial. Thus it stands confessed,—actually in the Transactions of the Royal Society,—that Professor Ferrier had the leading share (his name always appears first) in the experiments; and that, conjointly with Professor Yeo, he received a grant from the British Medical Association for performing the same!
If after this experience we have ceased to hope much from proceedings in Courts of Justice against our antagonists, it will not be thought surprising. The Society has been frequently twitted with the failure of this prosecution, “for which” our opponents say, we “had not a tittle of evidence.” Elaborate reports in the two leading Medical journals do not, it appears, afford even “a tittle of evidence!”34
Among other modes in which we endeavoured to push forward our cause, have been special appeals to win over particular churches or other bodies to adopt our principles. Enormous numbers of circulars have been addressed in this manner by our Society to the Clergy of the Church of England, and it is believed that at least 4,000 are on our side in the controversy; more than 2,000 had signed our Memorial several years ago.
Another appeal was addressed by me personally to the Society of Friends through the Clerks of the Monthly and Quarterly Meetings in England and Ireland.
It has proved eminently successful, and has led to the formation of a powerful “Friends’ Anti-vivisection Society,” which lately issued an appeal to other members of their body signed by 2,000 friends, many of them being among the most eminent in England. This has again formed the ground of a fresh appeal on an immense scale in Pennsylvania. Another recent appeal to the Congregationalists has, I hear, been very well received. On one occasion a special Petition to the House of Lords was signed by every Unitarian Minister in London. It was presented by the Archbishop of York, who also presented a Memorial (for Restriction) in 1876 signed by all the heads of Colleges in Oxford.
Another appeal which I ventured to make (printed as a large pamphlet) to “the Humane Jews of England,” entreating them to remonstrate with the 40 German Jews who are the worst vivisectors in Europe, was, unfortunately, a deplorable failure. Four of my own private friends, Jewesses, all expressed their sympathy warmly, and sent handsome contributions to our funds; but not one other Jew or Jewess, high or low, rallied to us, albeit I presented pamphlets to nearly 200 recommended to me as specially well disposed. I shall never be tempted to address the “Humane” Jews of England again!
One other circular I may mention as more successful. I sent to seven hundred Head Schoolmasters the following Letter, with which were enclosed the pamphlets mentioned therein:—
“Hengwrt, Dolgelly,
“September, 1886.
“Dear Sir,
“Permit me respectfully to ask your perusal of the accompanying little paper on ‘Physiology as a Branch of Education.’ I have written it under a strong sense of the necessity which at present exists for some similar caution.
“The leaflet describing a ‘Specimen of Modern Physiological Instruction,’ refers to a scene in Paris which could not be precisely paralleled in an English school, so far as concerns the actual torture of the animals used for exhibition, since the Vivisection Act of 1876 provided that anæsthetics must be used in all cases of Vivisection for Illustration of Lectures.
“It is, however, to be seriously questioned whether even painless, (and therefore not shocking), operations on living animals, performed before boys and girls, by the enthusiastic English admirers of Claude Bernard and Paul Bert, may not excite in the minds of the young witnesses a curiosity unmingled with pity, such as may subsequently prompt them to become the most merciless experimenters; or, at least, advocates and apologists of scientific cruelty.
“Trusting, Sir, that you will pardon the trespass of this letter,
“I am, sincerely yours,
“Frances Power Cobbe.”
Twelve of these Head Masters, including some of the most eminent, e.g., Mr. Welldon, of Harrow; Dr. Haig, of the Charterhouse; and the lamented Mr. Thring, of Uppingham, wrote me most interesting letters in reply expressing approval of my views. I shall here insert that of Mr. Thring as in many respects noteworthy.
“Rev. Edward Thring to Miss F. P. C.
“Pitlochry, Perthshire, N.B.,
“September 6th, 1889.
“My dear Madam,
“I received your little pamphlet on physiology, but I hardly know what you expect me to do. My writings on Education sufficiently show how strongly I feel on the subject of a Literary Education; or rather how confident I am in the judgment that there can be no worthy education which is not based on the study of the highest thoughts of the highest men, in the best shape.
“As for Science (most of it falsely so called) if a few leading minds are excepted, it simply amounts, to the average dull worker, to no more than a kind of upper shopwork, weighing out, and labelling, and learning alphabetical formulæ; a superior Grocery-assistant’s work; and has not a single element of higher mental training in it. Not to mention that it leaves out all knowledge of man and life, and therefore is eminently fitted to train men for life and its struggles! Physiology, in its worser sense adds to this a brutalising of the average practitioner, or rather a devilish combination of intellect-worship and cruelty at the expense of feeling and character. For my part, if it were true that vivisection had wonderfully relieved bodily disease for men, if it were at the cost of lost spirits, then I should say, Let the body perish! And it is at the cost of lost spirits! I do not say that under no circumstances should an experiment take place, but I do say that under no circumstance should an experiment take place for teaching purposes. You will see how decided my judgment is on this matter. I send you three Addresses on Education, which in smaller space than my books, will illustrate the positive side of my experience and beliefs.
“Yours faithfully,
“Edward Thring.”
Our Committee was, in all the years in which I had to do with it, the most harmonious and friendly of which I have ever heard. Lord Shaftesbury, who presided 49 times, and never once failed us when he was expected, was, of course, as all the world knows, a first-rate Chairman, getting through an immense amount of business, while allowing every member his, or her, legitimate rights of speech and voting. He never showed himself, (I have been told,) anywhere more genial and zealous than with us. Lord Mount-Temple attended very frequently, and Lady Mount-Temple from first to last has been one of our warmest and wisest friends. General Colin Mackenzie, a devout and noble old soldier, spoke little, but what he did say was always straight to the mark, and the affectionate respect we all felt for him made his presence delightful. Lady Portsmouth (now the Dowager Countess) attended in those days very regularly and Lady Camperdown has given us her unwearied help from that time to this. I have spoken of the very valuable services of Mr. E. de Fonblanque. In later years my friend Rev. William Henry Channing was a great support to me. The Cardinal was, perhaps, a little reserved, but always carefully kind and courteous, and whatever he said bore great weight. Lord Bute’s advice was very valuable and full of good sense. Mr. Shaen’s legal knowledge served us often. In brief, each member was useful. There never were any parties or cabals in the Committee. It was my business as Hon. Sec. (especially after my colleague, Dr. Hoggan, retired) to lay proposals for action before the Committee. They were sometimes rejected and often completely modified; but we all felt that the one thing we desired was simply to find the best way of forwarding our cause, and we were thankful for the guidance of the wise and experienced men who were our leaders. In short, the feelings which inspired us round that long oak office-table were not ill befitting our work; and now that so many of those who sat there beside me in the earlier years have passed from earth, I find myself pondering whether they have met “Elsewhere;” where, ere long I may join them. They must form a blessed company in any world. May my place be with them, please God! rather than with the votaries of Science, in the “secular to be.”
In later years the personnel of the Committee has of course been largely renewed. Lady Mount-Temple, Lady Camperdown and Mrs. Frank Morrison almost alone remain from the earlier body. Miss Marston also, who originally founded the London Anti-vivisection Society, has been for many years one of the firmest and wisest friends of the Victoria Street Society also. I have spoken above of all that we owe to Capt. Pirkis’ unfailing help at the Committee, even while residing far out of town; and of the zeal wherewith he and his gifted wife founded the first of our Branches, and have laboured in circulating our literature. Miss Monro, Miss Rees, Miss Bryant, and Mrs. Arthur Arnold have never wearied through many years in patiently and vigorously aiding our work. Of our excellent chairman, Mr. Ernest Bell’s services to the Anti-vivisection cause it is needless for me to speak as they must be recognised gratefully by the whole party throughout England.
We have had several successive Secretaries who sometimes took the work much off my hands, sometimes left it to fall very heavily on me and Miss Lloyd. On one occasion, we two, having also lost the clerk, did the entire work of the office for many weeks, inclusive of writing, editing, folding, addressing, and actually posting an issue of the Zoophilist! But my toils and many of my anxieties ended when I was fortunate enough to obtain the services, as Secretary, of Mr. Benjamin Bryan, who had long shown his genuine interest in the cause as editor of a Northern newspaper; and, after a year or two of work in concert with him, I felt free to leave the whole burden on his shoulders and tendered my resignation. The constant presence on the Committee of my long-tried and most valued allies Mr. Ernest Bell, Capt. Pirkis, and Miss Marston left me entirely at rest respecting the course of our future policy in the straight direction of Prohibition.
The last event which I need record is a disagreeable incident which occurred in the autumn of 1892. I had been seriously ill with acute sciatica, and had been only partially relieved by a large subcutaneous dose of morphia given me by my country doctor. In this state, with my head still swimming and scarcely able to sit at a table, I found myself involved in the most acrimonious newspaper controversy which I ever remember to have seen in any respectable journal. It will be best that another pen than mine should tell the story, so I will quote the calm and lucid statement of the author of the excellent pamphlet, “Vivisection at the Folkestone Church Congress” (page 6).
After a résumé of the notorious debate at Folkestone the writer says:—
“The main point of attack in Mr. Victor Horsley’s paper was a book called the Nine Circles which had been published some months before, and contained reports of different classes of cruel experiments on animals, both in England and on the Continent. To this book Miss Cobbe had given the sanction of her name, but she was not personally responsible for any of the quotations, having intrusted the compilation of the book to friends living in London, and who had access to the journals and papers in which the experiments were recorded. Mr. Horsley’s indignation was roused because in a certain number of cases—22 out of the 170 narratives of different classes of experiments, many of them involving a series, and the use of large numbers of animals in each—the mention of the use of morphia or chloroform was omitted. Miss Cobbe, in a letter to the Times of October 11th, while acknowledging that the compilers were bound to quote the fact if stated, expressed her conviction that such statements are misleading, because insensibility is not and cannot be complete during the whole period of the experiment. Dr. Berdoe also wrote in several papers defending Miss Cobbe against Mr. Horsley’s imputations of fraud and intent to deceive, &c., and explaining that the compilers of the book were alone responsible for the omissions. He added, however, a further explanation that, as it was often the painful results, and not the operations which caused them, that it was desired to illustrate, and as these results lasted sometimes for many days or weeks or months and to maintain insensibility during that period was impossible, the omissions were not so important after all.”...
“... The assailant, however, returned to the charge and in a more violent style than before. His letter to the Times of October 17th, was a tirade against Miss Cobbe, worthy, as the Spectator remarked, only of the fifteenth century, in which the words ‘false’ and ‘lie’ were freely used. It was a letter of so libellous a character that it is a matter for wonder that it obtained publication. Miss Cobbe very naturally and properly at once retired from a controversy conducted, as she expressed it in a letter to the Times, ‘outside of all my experience of civilised journalism.’ She concluded with these words: ‘I need scarcely say that I maintain the veracity of every word of the letter which you did me the honour to publish of the 15th inst., as well as the bona fides of all I have spoken or written on this or other subjects during my three-score years and ten.’”
After a week or two I went to Bath to recruit my health after the attack of sciatica; and the first newspaper I took up at the York Hotel, contained a still more violent attack on me than those which had preceded it. On reading it I walked into the telegraph office next door, wired for rooms at my favourite South Kensington Hotel and went up to town with my maid, presenting myself at once to our Committee, which happened to be sitting and arranging for the impending meeting in St. James’s Hall. “Shall I attend,” said I, “and speak, or not? I will do exactly what you wish.” The Committee were unanimously of opinion that I should go to the meeting and take part in the proceedings, and I have ever since rejoiced that I did so. It was on the evening of October 27th. My ever kind friend, Canon Basil Wilberforce took the chair, Col. Lockwood, Bishop Barry, Dr. Berdoe, Mr. Bell, and Captain Pirkis were on the platform supporting me, but above all Mr. George W. E. Russell (then Under Secretary of State for India) made a speech on my behalf for which I shall feel grateful to him so long as I live. We had but slight acquaintance previously, and I shall always feel that it was a most generous and chivalrous action on his part to stand forth in so public a manner as my champion on such an occasion. The audience was more than sympathetic. There was a storm of genuine feeling when I rose to make my explanation, and I found it, for once, hard to command my voice. This is what I said, as reported in the Zoophilist, November 1st, 1892:
“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)
Coleridge (Lord Chief Justice)
Worcester (Marquis of Worcester)
Haddington (Earl of Haddington)
Arthur, Bath and Wells (Bishop of Bath and Wells)
J., Manchester (Bishop of Manchester)
W. Walsham, Wakefield (Bishop of Wakefield)
H. B., Coventry (Bishop of Coventry)
John Mitchinson (Bishop)
F. Cramer-Roberts (Bishop)
Edward G. Bagshawe (R. C. Bishop of Nottingham)
Sidmouth (Viscount Sidmouth)
Pollington (Viscount Pollington)
Colville of Culross (Lord Colville of Culross)
Cardross (Lord Cardross)
H. Abinger (Lady Abinger)
Robartes (Lord Robartes)
Leigh (Lord Leigh)
C. Buchan (Dow. Countess of Buchan)
Harriet de Clifford (Dow. Lady de Clifford)
F. Camperdown (Countess of Camperdown)
Kinnaird (Lord Kinnaird)
Alma Kinnaird (Lady Kinnaird)
Clementine Mitford (Lady Clementine Mitford)
Eveline Portsmouth (Dowager Countess of Portsmouth)
Georgina Mount-Temple (Lady Mount-Temple)
H. Kemball (Lady Kemball)
J. Brotherton (Lady Brotherton)
Evelyn Ashley (Hon. Evelyn Ashley)
Bernard Coleridge (Hon. B. Coleridge, M.P.)
Geraldine Coleridge (Hon. Mrs. S. Coleridge)
Stephen Coleridge (Hon. Stephen Coleridge)
George Duckett (Sir George Duckett, Bt.)
Henry A. Hoare (Sir Henry Hoare, Bt.)
Geo. F. Shaw, LL.D.
Samuel Smith, M.P.
Theodore Fry, M.P.
George W. E. Russell, M.P.
Jacob Bright, M.P.
Th. Burt, M.P.
Julius Barras (Colonel)
Richard H. Hutton
R. Payne Smith
H. Wilson White, D.D., LL.D.
Edward Whately (Archdeacon Whately)
George W. Cox (Revd. Sir George Cox, Bart.)
R. M. Grier (Prebendary Grier)
Eleanor Vere C. Boyle (Hon. Mrs. R. C. Boyle)
E. G. Deane Morgan (Hon. Mrs. Deane Morgan)
Charles Bell Taylor, M.D.
Edward Berdoe, M.R.C.S.
Alex. Bowie, M.D., C.M.
John H. Clarke, M.D.
Henry Downes, M.D.
Henry M. Duncalfe
William Adamson, D.D.
William Adlam
Amelia E. Arnold
Ernest Bell
Rhoda Broughton
Olive S. Bryant
W. K. Burford
A. Gallenga and Mrs. Gallenga
Maria G. Grey
Emily A. E. Shirreff
Frances Holden
Eleanor Mary James
Francis Griffith Jones
E. J. Kennedy
Edith Leycester
W. S. Lilly
Mary Charlotte Lloyd
Ann Marston
Mary J. Martin
S. S. Munro
Frank Morrison
Harriet Morrison
Josiah Oldfield
Rose Pender
Fred. Pennington
Herbert Philips
Fred. E. Pirkis and Mrs. Pirkis
R. Ll. Price
Evelyn Price
R. M. Price
Lester Reed
Ellen Elcum Rees
J. Herbert Satchell
Mark Thornhill, J.P.
Looking back on this long struggle of twenty years, in which so much of my happiness and the happiness of others dearer than myself, has been engulfed, I can see that, starting from the apparently small and subordinate question of Scientific Cruelty, the controversy has been growing and widening till the whole department of ethics dealing with man’s relation to the lower animals has gradually been included in it. That this department is an obscure one, and that neither the Christian Churches nor yet philosophic moralists have hitherto paid it sufficient attention, is now admitted. That it is time that it should be carefully studied and worked out, is also clear.
Sometimes I have thought (as by a law of our being we seem driven to do whenever our hearts are deeply concerned) that a Divine guidance may have presided over all the heart-breaking delays and disappointments of this weary movement; and that it has not been allowed to terminate, as it would certainly have done, had we carried our Bill of 1876 in its original form through Parliament. Then our Society would have dissolved at once; and, after a time, perhaps, the Act, however well designed, would have become more or less a dead letter; and the hydra-heads of Vivisection would have reared themselves once more. But, as it has actually happened, the delay and failure of our earlier efforts and our consequent persistence in them, have fixed attention on this culminating sin against the lower animals, and through it on all other sins against them. A great revision of opinion on the subject is undoubtedly taking place; and while some (especially Roman Catholic) Zoophilists have diligently sought in decrees and manuals and treatises of casuistry for some authority defining Cruelty to animals to be a Sin, the poverty of the results of all such investigations, and of the anxious collation of Biblical texts by Protestants, is gradually revealing the fact that, in this whole department of human duty, we must look to the God-enlightened consciences of living men rather than to the dicta of departed saints, or casuists, whose attention was directed exclusively to the relations of human beings with each other and with God, and who obviously never contemplated those which we hold to the brutes with adequate seriousness,—if at all. Of course we are here met, just as the first anti-Slavery apostles were met, and as the advocates of every fresh development of morality will be met for many a day to come, by the fundamental fallacy of the Christian Churches (in that respect resembling Islam) that there is a finality in Divine teaching, and that they have been for two thousand years in possession of the last word of God to man. Protestants are certainly not bound in any way to occupy such a position, or to assume that a final revise has ever been issued, or ever will be issued by Divine authority, of a Whole Duty of Man. Rather are they called on piously and gratefully to look for fresh light to come down, age after age, from the Father of lights: or (if they please rather so to consider it) further development of the Christian Spirit to be manifested as men learn better to incarnate it in their minds and lives. As for Theists like myself, it is natural for us and in accordance with all our opinions, to believe that such a movement as is now taking place over the civilised world on behalf of dumb animals, is a fresh Divine impulse of Mercy, stirring in thousands of human hearts, and deserving of reverent cherishing and thankful acceptance.
It is my supreme hope that when, with God’s help, our Anti-vivisection controversy ends in years to come, long after I have passed away, mankind will have attained through it a recognition of our duties towards the lower animals far in advance of that which we now commonly hold. If the beautiful dream of the later Isaiah can never be perfectly realised on this planet and none may ever find that thrice “Holy Mountain” whereon they “shall not hurt nor destroy”—yet at least the time will come when no man worthy of the name will take pleasure in killing; and he who would torture an animal will be looked upon as (in the truest sense) “inhuman”; unworthy of the friendship of man or love of woman. The long-oppressed and suffering brutes will then be spared many a pang and their innocent lives made far happier; while the hearts of men will grow more tender to their own kind by cultivating pity and tenderness to the beasts and birds. The earth will at last cease to be “full of violence and cruel habitations.”
September, 1898.
The too confident expectations which I entertained of my permanent connection till death with the Society which I had founded and which I designed to make my heir, have alas! been disappointed. It was perhaps natural that in my long exile from London and consequent absence from the Committee, my continual letters of enquiry, advice, and (as I fondly and foolishly imagined) assistance in the work were felt to be obtrusive,—especially by the newer members. One change after another in the Constitution and in the Name of the Society, left me more or less in opposition to the ruling spirits; and before long a much more serious difference arose. The very able and energetic Hon. Sec., Hon. Stephen Coleridge, (who had entered on his office in April, 1897), after making the changes to which I have referred, proposed that we should introduce a Bill into Parliament, no longer on the old lines, asking for the Total Prohibition of Vivisection, but on quite a different basis; demanding certain “Lesser Measures,” not yet distinctly formulated, but intended to supply checks to the practical lawlessness of licensed Vivisectors. Mr. Coleridge and his brother (now Lord Coleridge), had, twelve or fourteen years before, urged me to abandon the demand for Total Prohibition, and to adopt the policy of Restriction and bring in a bill accordingly. But to this proposal I had made the most strenuous resistance, writing a long pamphlet on the Fallacy of Restriction for the purpose; and it had been (as I thought), altogether given up and forgotten. It would appear, however, that the idea remained in Mr. Coleridge’s mind,—with the modification that he now regarded “Lesser Measures” not as final Restriction, but as steps to Prohibition; and for this policy he obtained the suffrage of the majority of the Council, though not of the oldest members.
The reader who will kindly glance back over the preceding pages (300–306), will see the exceeding importance I attach to the maintenance of the strict principle of Abolition,—whereby our party renounces all compromise with the “abominable sin,” and refuses to be again cheated by the hocus-pocus of Vivisectors and their deceptive anæsthetics. But an over-estimate (as it seems to me) of the importance of Parliamentary action, and certainly an under-estimate of that of the great popular propaganda whereon our hopes must ultimately rest,—a propaganda which would be paralyzed by the advocacy of half measures,—caused Mr. Coleridge and his friends to take an opposite view. After a long and, to me, heart-breaking struggle, I was finally defeated by a vote of 29 to 23, at a Council Meeting on the 9th February, 1898. The policy of Lesser Measures was adopted by the newly-christened National Society; and I and all the oldest members and founders of the Victoria Street Society sorrowfully withdrew from what we had proudly, but very mistakenly, called “our” Society. Amongst us were Mr. Mark Thornhill, Miss Marston, Mr. and Mrs. Adlam, Lady Mount-Temple, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Morrison, Lady Paget, Madame Van Eys, and Countess Baldelli. To all workers in the cause these names will stand as representing the very nucleus of the whole party since it began its life 23 years ago. The oldest and most faithful worker of all, Lady Camperdown, who had aided me with the first memorial in 1874, and who had attended the Committee from first to last, had risen from her death-bed to write a letter imploring the Chairman not to support the demand for Lesser Measures. She died before the decision was reached, and her touching letter, in spite of my entreaties, was not read to the Congress.
After leaving the old Society with unspeakable pain and mortification I felt it incumbent on me, while I yet had a little strength left for work and was not wholly “played out” (as I believe I was supposed to be by the new spirits at the office) to establish some centre where the only principle on which the cause can, in my opinion, be safely maintained should be permanently established, and to which I could transfer the legacy of £10,000 which then stood in my Will bequeathed unconditionally to the Committee of the National Society. My first effort was to request the Committee of the London Anti-vivisection Society to give me such pledge as it was competent to afford that it would not promote any measure in Parliament short of Abolition. This pledge being formally refused, there remained for me no resource but to attempt once more in my old age to create a new Anti-Vivisection Society; and I resolved to call it The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, and to make it a Federation of Branch Societies, having its centre in Bristol where my staunch old fellow-workers had had their office for many years established and in first-rate order. I invited as many friends as seemed desirous of joining in my undertaking, to a private Conference here at Hengwrt; and I had the pleasure of receiving and entertaining them for three days while we quietly arranged the constitution of the new Union with the invaluable help of our Chairman, Mr. Norris, K.C., late one of the Justices of the Supreme Court, Calcutta.
The British Union was, in the following month, (June, 1898), formally constituted at a public conference in Bristol; and it is at present working vigorously in Bristol and in its various Branches in Wales, Liverpool, York, Macclesfield, Sheffield, Yarmouth and London. All information concerning it and its special constitution (whereby the Branches will all profit by bequests to the Union) may be obtained by enquiry from either our admirable Hon. Sec., Mrs. Roscoe (Crete Hill, Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol); our zealous Secretary, Miss Baker, 20, Triangle, Bristol; or our Hon. Treasurer, John Norris, Esq., K.C., Devonshire Club, London.
To those of my readers who may desire to contribute to the Anti-Vivisection Cause, and who have shared my views on it as set forth in my numberless pamphlets and letters, and to those specially who, like myself, intend to bequeath money to carry on the war against Scientific Cruelty, I now earnestly say as my final Counsel: SUPPORT THE BRITISH UNION!