Great Testimony Part 2

It is perhaps now long forgotten that he initiated, drafted and carried through the House of Commons when he sat in that a.s.sembly as member for Exeter a Bill emanc.i.p.ating married women from the cruel conditions of servitude whereby their own earnings could legally be taken from them by their husbands.

This was the first of a series of wide-minded Acts of Parliament which established the position of women as no longer the mere chattels of their male relatives.

Cruelty to animals of any kind roused in him a deep and abiding anger: he never allowed a bearing rein to be inflicted upon his horses either in London or the country, nor was there ever a tied-up dog in his stables.

Lord Coleridge a.s.sisted in the efforts to get the Anti-Vivisection Bill of 1876 pa.s.sed without the wrecking amendments that were at the last minute added to it; after the Bill was pa.s.sed in its mutilated state Miss Cobbe with a not unnatural impatience wrote to him and others saying that "the supporters of vivisection having refused to accept a reasonable compromise or to permit any line to be drawn between morally justifiable painless experiments and those which are heinously cruel and involve the torture of the most sensitive animals" she intended to endeavour to induce the Society "to condemn the practice altogether as inseparably bound up with criminal abuses"; and henceforth to adopt "the principle of uncompromising hostility to vivisection," and she asked him to let her know whether he would give his support to her proposals. His reply was what might have been expected from one who could not permit his irritation at the fate of the Bill to influence his parliamentary att.i.tude.

I am afraid [he wrote] my answer must be in a sense which you will think unfavourable. I could not commit myself out of Parliament to any view which I am not prepared to defend _in_ it. And the unreasonableness and what I think wrongdoing of the Medical Men would not justify me as a legislator in voting for what _I_ think wrong merely in opposition to them or because I could not bring them to terms which I think just and right.

I do not say that this is at all necessarily the rule for a person out of Parliament, because so long as you do not agitate for what you think _wrong_ it is perfectly fair to agitate for more than you expect to get as a means of getting something of what you think right. So that I find no fault whatever with any one who takes the view you take; but my position is somewhat a peculiar one and I must be cautious to an extent that some people may think coldness and weakness. I am not afraid of your judgment however.

Six years later, in 1882, he wrote an article in the _Fortnightly Review_ in which he definitely though reluctantly gave his adhesion to total abolition as the goal to be aimed at, but of course he never at any time a.s.sociated himself with the condemnation of all other measures for the mitigation of the cruelties of the laboratory or of the world at large that has since been p.r.o.nounced by the more extreme protagonists on the anti-vivisection side of the controversy.

This article dealt in a pungent severity with attacks made upon him in the _Nineteenth Century_ by Sir James Paget, Professor Owen and Dr.

Wilks. As far as I know none of them rejoined. They had had enough!

But the last pa.s.sage of the article is of a quality that I think my readers will regard as fully justifying my reproducing it here,--I hope it will receive their endors.e.m.e.nt--the hand that wrote it has long been still, but thirty-four years have not made one word of it less true or less beautiful.

There is one authority, conclusive, no doubt, only to those who admit it, conclusive only to those who believe that they can read it, to which in conclusion I dare appeal. When a bishop in the Southern States had been defending slavery, he was asked what he thought our Lord would have said, what looks He who turned and looked upon St.

Peter would have cast upon a slave-mart in New Orleans, where husband was torn from wife, child from parent, and beautiful girls, with scarce a tinge of colour in them, were sold into prost.i.tution. The answer of the bishop is not known, but I will venture on a kindred question. What would our Lord have said, what looks would He have bent, upon a chamber filled with "the unoffending creatures which He loves," dying under torture deliberately and intentionally inflicted?

or kept alive to endure further torment, in pursuit of knowledge?

Men must answer this question according to their consciences; and for any man to make himself in such a matter a rule for any other would be, I know, unspeakable presumption. But to anyone who recognises the authority of our Lord, and who persuades himself that he sees which way that authority inclines, the mind of Christ must be the guide of life. "Shouldest thou not have had compa.s.sion upon these, even as I had pity on thee?" So He seems to me to say, and I shall act accordingly.

CHAPTER VI: JOHN RUSKIN

No one who has ever read a line of Ruskin could doubt on which side his mind and heart would be ranged in the controversy over vivisection.

Here was a lord of language who was also one of the great moral teachers of the world. To him the torture of a helpless animal for a scientific purpose was a defiance of religion and an insult to G.o.d. Such pursuits he declared "were all carried on in defiance of what had hitherto been held to be compa.s.sion and pity, and of the great link which bound together the whole of creation from its Maker to the lowest creature."

[Picture: John Ruskin. From a drawing by Samuel Laurence in the collection of John Lane]

He occupied the ill.u.s.trious post of Slade Professor of art at Oxford when convocation voted to endow vivisection in the University and install Dr.

Burdon Sanderson, the smotherer of dogs, in a laboratory set up for him.

In vain did Ruskin protest against this horrible educational cancer being grafted on to the happiness, peace, and light of gracious Oxford.

Convocation preferred the blight of the coward Science to the cultivation of all that was beautiful, distinguished, humane, and brave; and they reaped as they had sown, they kept the dog smotherer and lost the radiant spirit and uplifting eloquence of the inspired seer. Ruskin resigned and Oxford heard that voice of supreme n.o.bility no more.

The Vice-Chancellor for very shame could not bring himself to read Ruskin's letter of resignation to convocation. The editor of the _University Gazette_ also had the effrontery to leave a letter from Ruskin, giving the reasons for his resignation, unpublished; and the _Pall Mall Gazette_ crowned the edifice of poltroonery by announcing that he had resigned owing to his "advancing years."

Evil communications corrupt good manners, and a.s.sociation with vivisection led these dignitaries and editors to flout and insult a man whose shoe strings they were not worthy to tie. Time is merciful and their very names are forgotten.

Ruskin had, a little time before these events, asked the University for a grant to build a well-lighted room for the undergraduates apart from the obscure and inconvenient Ruskin school; his request was instantly refused on the plea that the University was in debt, yet in the very next year this debt enc.u.mbered seat of learning and courtesy voted 10,000 pounds for the erection of a laboratory for the vivisector and 2,000 pounds more towards fitting it up and maintaining it,--for troughs and gags and cages and the rest of the horrible paraphernalia.

This must I should imagine be the most squalid page in the history of modern Oxford.

More than thirty years have pa.s.sed since that University thus publicly preferred a dog smootherer to one of the n.o.blest of teachers and saintliest of men.

Both are now long departed. The one can no more block up the wind-pipes of living dogs and watch their dying convulsions, and the other can no longer lead the minds of youths and maidens to seek and find beauty in the visible world about them and recognise in it the hand of G.o.d--but the world has known which of these men led the youth of Oxford to look up and which to look down, and to-day a merciful oblivion covers the names and doings of this triumphant vivisector and his valiant supporters, while to the farthest inch of the English-speaking realms the writings of Ruskin are treasured in a million homes and his name acclaimed with grateful reverence.

_NOTE_.--This chapter on Ruskin having appeared as an article in _The Animals' Defender and Zoophilist_ in March, 1917, and a copy of it having been sent to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the following correspondence ensued:--

CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD, _March_ 3_rd_, 1917.

DEAR SIR,--I thank you for sending me the copy of _The Zoophilist_.

May I point out that it is not customary for the Vice-Chancellor to read to Convocation the letters of Professors who resign, or to print the letters in the Gazette?

Yours very truly, T. B. STRONG.

HON. STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

SOUTH WALES CIRCUIT, a.s.sIZE COURT, CARDIFF, _March_ 6_th_, 1917.

DEAR SIR,--I have received your letter of the 3rd of March informing me that it is not customary for the Vice-Chancellor to read to Convocation the letters of professors who resign or to print such letters in the University Gazette, but I do not understand from you that the Vice-Chancellor is precluded by any rule of Convocation from reading such a letter, or that the editor if there be one of the University Gazette is unable by any rule of his office to admit such a letter to his columns--and I therefore feel that I was quite ent.i.tled to make the comments I did in _The Animals' Defender and Zoophilist_. When such a man as Ruskin desired the reasons for his resignation to be made clear, I take leave to think that the breach of a custom that enabled the University to conceal those reasons and even permit misapprehensions of those reasons to be given a wide publicity, would have been better than its observance. And a University Gazette that refuses to publish the letter of a world-famous professor of that University, must arrogate to itself a t.i.tle to which it can justly make no claim.

Very truly yours, STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF CHRIST CHURCH, VICE-CHANCELLOR, OXFORD.

At this distance of time it is probable that the present Dean of Christ Church may not fully realise the sort of person Professor Sanderson, whom the University preferred to Ruskin, was: I therefore think he may like to see a letter I wrote at the time to the papers which has fortunately been preserved:

SIR,--I hope you will find room for an answer to the remarkable letter of Professor Acland in your issue of the 9th, and to "F.R.S.'s" attack on Miss Cobbe in that of the 10th of March.

Professor Acland says:--

"I have to say to English parents that everyone at home and abroad, who knows anything of biological science in England, will think them fortunate if their children being students of medicine, fall under the elevating influence of Professor Sanderson's scientific and personal character."

And "F.R.S." says:--

"I was a very constant attendant at Dr. Sanderson's private laboratory during the last ten years of his professors.h.i.+p at University College, and during the whole of that time I never witnessed a single operation involving pain."

Now, are we not justified in estimating Professor Sanderson's n.o.bility of disposition by his books?

He was joint author and editor of the "Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory," the publication in which of the tortures of animals roused a feeling in the country that led to the appointment of the Royal Commission to inquire into these practices. And is he not now one of the editors of the _Journal of Physiology_, which continually details to the world experiments involving terrible torments?

In his "Handbook of Physiology" we find such descriptions as the following:--

Page 319. "(109).--_Asphyxia by complete Occlusion of the Trachea_.--For this purpose a cannula must be fixed air-tight in the trachea, the mouth of which is of such form that it can be plugged with a cork. . . . The phenomena as they present themselves in the dog. . . . _First minute_. Excessive respiratory movements in which at first the expansive efforts of the thoracic muscles, afterwards the expulsive efforts of the abdominal wall, are most violent.

Towards the close of the first minute the animal becomes convulsed.

_Second minute_. Early in the second minute the convulsions cease, often suddenly; simultaneously with the cessation the expiratory efforts become indistinguishable. The iris is now dilated to a rim; the eye does not close when the cornea is touched, nor does the pupil react to light; all reflex reaction to stimuli has ceased. All the muscles except those of inspiration are flaccid, and the animal lies in a state of tranquility which contrasts in the most striking way with the storm which preceded it . . . _Third and fourth minute_. As death approaches the thoracic and abdominal movements which are entirely respiratory become slow and slower as well as shallower. . . .

In the spasms which accompany the final gasps of an asphyxiated animal the head is thrown back, the trunk straightening or arched backwards, and the limbs are extended while the mouth gapes and the nostrils dilate. They are called by physiologists stretching convulsions."

Page 320. "(110).--_Asphyxia by Slow Suffocation_.--When an animal is allowed to breathe the same quant.i.ty of air repeatedly and continuously out of a bag, the process being of much longer duration, the phenomena can be studied with greater facility."

After this, is it "ill-natured or ill-mannered" to think that parents will _not_ be fortunate if "their children fall under the elevating influence of Dr. Sanderson's scientific and personal character"?