Great Testimony Part 1

Great Testimony.

by Stephen Coleridge.

PREFACE

If the support of great and good men, famous throughout Christendom, will avail to justify a cause, then indeed we who would utterly abolish the torture of animals by vivisection can never be put out of countenance.

Difficult would it be indeed to bring together the authority of so many resounding reputations against any other act of man, since slavery was abolished.

The poets, philosophers, saints and seers of England have united to anathematise it as an abomination, and as a deed only possible to a craven.

It seems strange that in the face of such authentic condemnation the horrid practice has not disappeared off the face of the civilised earth, until it is observed that it has received the shameless support of science, which for two generations has usurped an authority over conduct for which it possesses no credentials. The modern prostration of mankind before science is a vile idolatry. In the realm of ethics science is not constructive but destructive. It exalts the Tree of Knowledge and depresses the Tree of Life.

How is the character of man elevated or purified by all the maddening inventions of science? How indeed! Are we made better men by being whirled about the globe by machinery, by the increased opportunities for limitless volubility, or by the ingenious devices for mutual destruction?

And how are we morally advantaged by the knowledge of the infinite depths of s.p.a.ce, the composition of the stars and the motions of the planets?

The old Persian, when his far-travelled offspring returned with these wonders to tell, replied: "My son, thou sayest that one star spinneth about another star; let it spin!"

And Ruskin once remarked: "Newton explained why an apple fell, but he never thought of explaining the exactly correlative, but infinitely more difficult question, how the apple got up there."

The dead and dreary law of gravitation made it fall, but the glorious law of life, known only to G.o.d, drew it up out of the earth and hung it in all its inexplicable wonder high in the air.

And I think herein is a very good parable applicable to ourselves and our age.

Science has found out that everything in the Universe is falling towards everything else, or trying to do so, and we are so absorbed in this deciduous discovery that we have forgotten to look up and observe the lovely things about us that by G.o.d's mercy have still escaped the withering touch of scientific knowledge.

But Science has now moved beyond the comparatively innocuous acc.u.mulation of mechanical discoveries, and advancing into the domain of morals, has emerged in the sinister aspect of the defender of cruelty.

This may yet prove an usurpation that will lead to its ultimate deposition and ignominy. A time is coming when mankind will have no ear for the advocates of what all the great and good and wise have denounced as wicked.

If Science comes before the world declaring that cruelty is necessary for its advance, the world will one day tell Science that it can stop where it is.

In the meanwhile that there can be no doubt in the mind of any man as to how the greatest leaders of thought and loftiest teachers of conduct have united in their condemnation of vivisection, I have thought it timely to bring them together, a n.o.ble array, in this book.

CHAPTER I: THE SEVENTH EARL OF SHAFTESBURY, K.G.

FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY

[Picture: The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. From an engraving by W.

J. Edwards after Frederick Sandys]

The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury consecrated a long life, and dedicated a great position to the service of the poor, the weak and the lost. His life and work were one of the chief glories of the nineteenth century.

From early youth to venerable age his hand was outstretched to a.s.suage the miseries of the helpless and to deal a blow at cruelty and selfishness wherever he discerned it.

By his efforts women were brought up out of coal mines where they dragged trucks on all fours like brute beasts, by his protests little boys were saved from being forced to climb up inside chimneys risking their young lives and limbs that others might profit thereby.

He placed himself at the head of the fight against all cruelty to children and became the first President of the Society to put it down, which has now become great and powerful with officers in every town to guard child life and protect the helpless little things from all manner of nameless sufferings.

He championed the animal world and raised his voice against the unspeakable doings of the vivisectors, and the whole anti-vivisection movement was started and built up under his wise and benign guidance, as first President of the Anti-Vivisection Society.

He belonged to the period when those who worked in the field of philanthropy were almost exclusively concerned in curing, if they could, the evils they perceived around them; but he himself was a pioneer of the later school who aim also at preventing those evils. Those who went before him sought to a.s.sist the poor and helpless, but while he endeavoured to do this with all his heart, he also strove to destroy the causes of pauperism. He perceived that physical squalor inevitably produces spiritual squalor, and that if we are to make men think and live cleanly we must enable them to possess decent and clean homes.

Others of his family in the past had served the State with credit in the great public offices that satisfy men's reputable pride and honourable ambition, but none before him had served his fellow creatures during a long life with no other motive than to bind up their wounds and aggravate the mercies of G.o.d.

His appearance when I had the happiness to know him intimately was n.o.ble and memorable, and he won his way less by commanding abilities than by weight of character. His large benignity repressed the expression of any small or mean thought in his presence; and his arrival was sufficient without his saying a word to elevate the tone and manner of any discussion in which he was expected to partic.i.p.ate. He was incapable of asperity.

In the House of Lords there was conceded to him by universal courtesy a special seat which he occupied independently of the change of parties, a tribute of respect to his unique and distinguished position which as far as I am aware has at any rate in recent years been paid to no one else.

He was a survival of the times when rank more recognised its duties and received more homage than in the present day; for when I was young it was still possible for the public to believe that peerages were only conferred on men for serious and meritorious services to the country, and that those who succeeded to them by inheritance were trained to recognise the large obligations of their station.

He lived in a great house on the west side of Grosvenor Square, tempering his august surroundings with a personal austerity. There he was easily accessible to anyone who came to him for good counsel and not to waste his own or his host's time.

Every cabman and costermonger in London knew him by sight and would take off his cap to him if he saw him in the streets, and the poor in the East End knew his tall figure and distinguished countenance better than did the men in the club windows in the West.

The beautiful monument to his memory in Regent Circus records that he was "an example to his order," and yet better than this stately panegyric is the happy accident, if it be one, that the poor flower girls of London have pitched their camp upon the steps, and have successfully defied all the efforts of Mr. b.u.mble to remove them.

CHAPTER II: MISS FRANCES POWER COBBE

Miss Frances Power Cobbe was the original organiser and founder in December, 1875, of the National Anti-Vivisection Society which until 1898 bore the t.i.tle of the Victoria Street Society for the protection of animals from vivisection.

Many years before, in 1863, there lived at Florence a man who trafficked in torture named Schiff; "among the inferior professors of medical knowledge," says Dr. Johnson, "is a race of wretches, whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty," and such an one was this miscreant.

Miss Cobbe was then resident at Florence and was the correspondent of the _Daily News_, and in that paper she denounced the tortures inflicted on animals by this dreadful man, which so affected her generous heart that for the rest of her life her chief preoccupation became the desire to put an end to such abominations.

In 1874 Miss Cobbe drew up a memorial to the Council of the Royal Society for the prevention of cruelty to animals urging upon them "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 with indefatigable zeal she collected the signatures to it of a very large number of the most distinguished men in England; among them were such names as those of Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Morley, John Bright, Leslie Stephen, W. Lecky, B.

Jowett, John Ruskin, Dean Stanley, and Canon Liddon.

In view of the fierce advocacy of vivisection to which the present Lord Knutsford has committed himself it is interesting to record that his father Sir Henry Holland's name appears among the signatories of this memorial.

The Council of the R.S.P.C.A. in 1875 displayed all the familiar characteristics of the Council of to-day. On receiving this notable memorial they adopted the device of promising to appoint a sub-committee to consider the whole question of vivisection. Unlike the sub-committee appointed in 1907 "to consider the whole question of sport" which never sat, it seems that this sub-committee on vivisection really did sit once, after which no more was heard of it.

Mr. Colam the Secretary was sent to call on the leading vivisectors to ask them about their own proceedings; and the Council appear to have imagined that, having asked the persons whose conduct was impugned what they thought about that conduct, their function as representing the Society entrusted with the protection of animals from cruelty was fulfilled.

Miss Cobbe, like many of us to-day, really wanted cruelty to animals stopped, and she was not likely to be satisfied with such a farcical evasion, so she set to work and started the Victoria Street Society, and to her above all others therefore belongs the undying fame and glory of first raising aloft the standard of the imperishable cause for which that Society exists and strives.

In that memorable year of 1875 the great Society in Jermyn Street, misrepresented by a collection of somnolent inefficients, turned their backs on tortured animals and stopped their ears to their cries of agony; and all the subsequent years are strewn with opportunities abandoned and duties neglected which one by one have been undertaken by fresh Societies of earnest souls who would wait no more while the Council in Jermyn Street slept; and that the record should be maintained intact we have seen in the last three years the generous public subscribe an enormous sum of money for the care and cure of our horses at the war, only to discover that the Society is ready to acquiesce when those horses, that are worn out in our service, are sold abroad to the highest bidders!

Miss Cobbe during her long combat against vivisection pa.s.sed through different phases of opinion as to the wisest parliamentary policy to pursue. At one time she advocated restriction, at another total abolition, and I will not here revive the domestic discussions and differences that were the consequence of the diverse views entertained by equally reputable and earnest workers in the cause. It is enough to recognise and acclaim the fine courage and ability that Miss Cobbe brought to the service of suffering animals, and the splendid edifice of the National Anti-Vivisection Society that was built up from the ground by her capable hands.

She suffered one cruel betrayal when she entrusted to another too ardent controversialist the translation of some German account of a severe vivisection, and discovered, after the publication of the description in English, that her friend had suppressed in the translation the statement in the original that anaesthetics had been employed.