Great Testimony Part 3

We want to know how medicine is advanced by the agonies of these suffocated animals?

It may be true that Professor Sanderson at present holds no certificate, nor does Dr. Michael Foster, who occupies a similar position at Cambridge, but Dr. Michael Foster has "a.s.sistants" who hold from time to time certificates, and quite lately, "under his guidance," a lady, Miss Emily Nunn, has been poisoning frogs till their skin comes off. There is nothing to prevent Professor Sanderson from employing a.s.sistants. The mind may be the mind of Professor Sanderson, but the knife may be the knife of such a man as Dr. Klein, who was his former a.s.sistant at the Brown Inst.i.tution, and who has publicly declared that "he has no regard at all for the sufferings of the animals."

Your obedient servant, STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

12 OVINGTON GARDENS, LONDON, _March_ 13_th_, 1885.

On the publication of this letter the Dean of Christ Church of that day, Dean Liddell, wrote to me a long rambling letter which I could not then, and cannot now, publish because it concludes with these words:--

I have written this not for publication. I will not engage in newspaper controversy. I write to you, out of respect for the name you bear,--not in anger but in sorrow.

To this I replied:

To my letter in the Press you have no word to offer. In it I quote verbatim Professor Sanderson's own description of one of the many wanton torments that he has inflicted upon the good creatures of G.o.d.

I ask how medicine is advanced by the agonies of the dogs he has slowly suffocated, and I get no answer (though I have sent the letter to him and some twenty other vivisectors) but this expression from you of sorrow that the name I bear should be ranged on the side of this man's opponents.

Sir, I am a young man, unskilled in polemics and unpractised in the art of advocacy, no match for one of mature age, ripe experience, and stored learning; but if an enthusiasm for mercy, a belief that human life itself is not fitly bought by the torturing of the helpless, an amazement that any Christian, nay that any man should call one of these tormentors "friend," be sentiments the holding of which by one of my name fills you with sorrow if not with anger, it without doubt is plain that our name is but a name to you, and that your respect for it should have been withdrawn when it first came into prominence.

I do not believe you know what things these men have done; it is a terrible task for any man to read their literature; if you had done so I do indeed believe that not your sorrow only but your anger would be deeply roused, but--not against me.

I remain, Sir, Faithfully and Respectfully yours, STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

It gives me peculiar pleasure to bring up this letter from the now distant past; thirty-two years have not made me wish to withdraw or change a word of it.

CHAPTER VII: DR. JOHNSON

Of all the Masters of letters that have adorned and elevated the speech of our race Dr. Johnson is in many ways the most lovable. The son of a poor bookseller in Lichfield {40} with an uncouth figure and an undistinguished countenance, he rose by the ma.s.sive force of his character and the tireless persistence of his industry to an unchallenged supremacy in the literary world of his age, displaying in his whole life the truth of his own dictum that "few things are impossible to diligence and skill." Disdaining the common habit of the times he would owe nothing to the patronage of the great. "Is not a patron," he wrote to Lord Chesterfield, "one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground enc.u.mbers him with help?"

[Picture: Dr. Johnson. From a contemporary etching published February 10th, 1780]

He was not very patient with the stupid, or merciful to the absurd, and vanity never came into his presence without receiving swift and mortal blows; but the chastis.e.m.e.nt of his caustic tongue never fell upon modest worth, and there never lived a man who was a more faithful and affectionate friend.

The style of his writing is always balanced and sonorous, and everywhere and always is he "the friend of the wise and teacher of the good."

No man was more ready to give forcible expression to his amusing prejudices, as when he exclaimed that "the n.o.blest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England," but to be able to a.s.sert of any act of man that Dr. Johnson in solemn seriousness condemned it, is for ever to arraign that act in the court of human morals; and so the judicious must concede that when his authority can be cited in fierce and glowing denunciation of vivisectors they are left in a demersed condition.

I took occasion when giving evidence before the last Royal Commission on Vivisection to rehea.r.s.e Dr. Johnson's philippic which I now reproduce below, and the dejected and deflated aspect of the vivisectors on the commission when I had finished it caused that moment to be one of those I shall always recall with exhilaration! Not a word had one of them to say while I waited for any comment they might adventure, and after a diverting and eloquent silence Lord Selby from the chair remarked, "That leaves no doubt about Dr. Johnson's view in his day." It most certainly does not!

The _Idlers_ that sport only with inanimate nature may claim some indulgence; if they are useless, they are still innocent; but there are others, whom I know not how to mention without more emotion than my love of quiet willingly admits. Among the inferior professors of medical knowledge is a race of wretches whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty; whose favourite amus.e.m.e.nt is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive; to try how long life may be continued in various degrees of mutilation, or with the excision or laceration of the vital parts; to examine whether burning irons are felt more acutely by the bone or tendon; and whether the more lasting agonies are produced by poison forced into the mouth, or injected into the veins, it is not without reluctance that I offend the sensibility of the tender mind with images like these. If such cruelties were not practised it were to be desired that they should not be conceived; but, since they are published every day with ostentation, let me be allowed once to mention them, since I mention them with abhorrence.

_Mead_ has invidiously remarked of _Woodward_ that he gathered sh.e.l.ls and stones, and would pa.s.s for a philosopher. With pretentions much less reasonable the anatomical novice tears out the living bowels of an animal and styles himself physician, prepares himself by familiar cruelty for that profession which he is to exercise upon the tender and the helpless, upon feeble bodies and broken minds, and by which he has opportunities to extend his arts and torture, and continue those experiments upon infancy and age, which he has. .h.i.therto tried upon cats and dogs. What is alleged in defence of these hateful practices everyone knows, but the truth is that by knives, fire, and poisons, knowledge is not always sought, and is very seldom attained.

I know not that by living dissections any discovery has been made by which a single malady is more easily cured. And if the knowledge of physiology has been somewhat increased, he surely buys knowledge dear who learns the use of the lacteals at the expense of his own humanity. It is time that a universal resentment should arise against those horrid operations, which tend to harden the heart and make the physician more dreadful than the gout or the stone.

CHAPTER VIII: THOMAS CARLYLE VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY

The world of letters and of ethics has hardly yet settled whether much of the teaching of the Sage of Chelsea should be the subject of praise or blame.

In the advocacy of fine principles of conduct set forth for us in language of surpa.s.sing eloquence and earnest conviction in many a page of "Sartor Resartus," and scattered through innumerable pamphlets, Carlyle commands the fervent adhesion of the honest, the brave, and the good; while in other parts of his writings his infatuated admiration of force, however clothed with brutality, and of strength, however marred with mendacity, are calculated as deeply to alienate the urbane man of the world as the austere Christian.

And this confusion in the estimate of Carlyle and of his teaching suffers an aggravation from the manifest malice of the biography of him perpetrated by his friend James Anthony Froude. A man who is entrusted with the task of writing the life of a great man who was also his friend need not adopt the language of continuous panegyric, but to throw a brilliant illumination upon the man's smaller domestic rugosities which even the weakest charity would conceal and the feeblest generosity would forget is a singularly spiteful betrayal.

When something was said to Carlyle about the likelihood of the Dean of Westminster recognising his fame as justifying his interment in the Abbey, the rugged old man exclaimed, "Deliver me from that body-s.n.a.t.c.her." It would have been more to the purpose if he had been delivered from his intimate friend as his biographer!

That Carlyle detested vivisection, however, must ever remain a great tribute both to him and to our cause. Many circ.u.mstances of the man and his teaching might have led the world to antic.i.p.ate that he would very likely be found indifferent on the subject. His earnest adhesion to our principles leaves those who politely call us old women of both s.e.xes in a foolish case, for nothing could be more divertingly absurd than so to cla.s.sify Carlyle.

I think Froude forgot to mention Carlyle's stern condemnation of vivisection in his biography, which is more remarkable inasmuch as Froude himself was a firm and outspoken supporter of our cause.

Whether we can faithfully take to heart and follow all the teaching of this "old Man eloquent" will long remain a subject of debate, but no one can rise from his works without recognising a moral grandeur in him that far out-tops the very human flaws that may even serve to make him more penetrative to our own imperfect hearts.

There seems to be a law that compels all the truly great men of letters, from Shakespeare and Johnson down to our own day, to abhor the torture of animals for our supposed benefit, and to that law Thomas Carlyle starkly adhered.

CHAPTER IX: TENNYSON VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY

[Picture: Tennyson. From an unpublished photograph in the possession of Charles Bruce Locker Tennyson, C. M. G.]

Tennyson, as was inevitable with a man of such n.o.bility of mind and life, regarded the torture of animals for the sake of knowledge with "the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn."

If authority be cited in great moral questions here is one that must compel reverence from all but the poor trifler with his "hollow smile and frozen sneer."

He looked modern Science in the eye, perceived whither its aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of knowledge to a place supreme in human estimate, above conduct, must inevitably lead mankind, and proclaimed, in accents which can never die, that it is impossible for man to acquiesce in a G.o.dless world.

He taught us that men's hearts can never be satisfied with a world explained and comprised by the cold "changeless law" of foreordained evolution and inevitable destiny. "Knowledge comes," said he, "but wisdom lingers."

From the first, then, Tennyson lent the weight of his splendid name to the cause of mercy, and I find his signature to the original great pet.i.tion for the restriction of vivisection between those of Leslie Stephen and Robert Browning on the same sheet of paper--a sheet of paper now one of the treasured possessions of the National Anti-Vivisection Society.

All the world knows the allusions in his works to those who "carve the living hound," and to curare, which he called "the h.e.l.lish oorali." And thus this greatest poet of the Victorian age gave the weight of his commanding authority for all time to a fierce condemnation of vivisection as the most awful and monstrous of the offsprings of modern Science.

Tennyson was religious in the widest and most inspiring sense.

"Almost the finest summing up of religion," he wrote, "is 'to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with G.o.d.'"

"To love mercy!" That is the true sign of magnanimity in man. All holy men, all brave men, all great and knightly men have loved mercy. "It is an attribute to G.o.d Himself."

Time pa.s.ses, and succeeding races of mankind, like the leaves of autumn, are blown away and perish, but countless men of heroic mould, reaching back into the dim mists of legend and down through innumerable years while the great world spins "for ever down the ringing grooves of change," have one and all been gloriously crowned with the same s.h.i.+ning diadem of mercy.