Stephen Coleridge

“ 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 p. vian 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. ”

“ 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 hitherto tried upon cats and dogs. ”

“ No one who has ever read a line of Ruskin could doubt on which side his mind and heart would be ranged in the controversy over vivisection.
Here was a lord of language who was also one of the great moral teachers of the world. To him the torture of a helpless animal for a scientific purpose was a defiance of religion and an insult to God. ”

“ 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 amusement is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 looked modern Science in the eye, perceived whither its aggrandisement 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 godless world. ”

“ Time passes, 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 shining diadem of mercy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No doubt whenever there shall arise in the ministry of the Church of England men of the commanding power, distinguished character, and potent speech that these great men of the last generation displayed we shall find them also espousing the cause of the helpless vivisected animals; in the meanwhile the occupiers of the most dignified positions in the Established Church seem to have drifted into the somewhat ignoble attitude of avoiding the disagreeable subject of vivisection altogether. ”

“ 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.
p. 51“Almost the finest summing up of religion,” he wrote, “is ‘to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.’”
“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 God Himself.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is always the loftiest names in literature and the most illustrious authorities on ethics that are found ranged against the infliction of suffering upon helpless animals for the enlargement of human knowledge.
Those who support such inflictions are never in the first rank of literature, art, or moral teaching. ”

“ Now, are we not justified in estimating Professor Sanderson’s nobility 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? ”

“ Among the eminent men and women of England whose names are not to be regarded as world famous in the sense that applies to those dealt with in the foregoing chapters, but who nevertheless in their place and time were recognised by their contemporaries and are still recognised by those now living as persons of authority and ability, there can be cited a distinguished array who consistently condemned vivisection as permitted and as practised in this country as immoral. ”

“ In these present times only a few people in the metropolis, and hardly anybody out of it, can tell without consulting some book of reference who may be the estimable persons who to-day fill the Deanery of Westminster and the Mastership of the Temple, nor has Canon Liddon any successor that the world acclaims, and I can vouch for it that none of them has ever extended to us a helping hand or publicly condemned the torture of animals for scientific purposes. ”

“ I grieve to say that abroad there are a great many (whom I beg leave to say I do not represent) who do favour the practice; but this I do protest, that there is not a religious instinct in nature, nor a religion of nature, nor is there a word in revelation, either in the Old Testament or the New Testament, nor is there to be found in the great theology which I do represent, no, nor in any Act of the Church of which I am a member ”

“ The most penetrating criticism will fail to discover a fault either of taste or diction or intent in any of these utterances. They combine the dignity appropriate to the words of the greatest Sovereign of the World, with the intimate friendliness that proceeds from the wellsprings of a sweet woman’s heart. ”

“ He taught us that men’s hearts can never p. 50be 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 petition 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. ”

“ 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 God. ”

“ 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 p. 9started 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. ”

“ I do not like to go into particulars, for many reasons, but one of those instances which we read of as happening in this day, and which seems more shocking than the rest, is when the poor dumb victim is fastened against a wall, pierced, gashed, and so left to linger out its life. ”

“ 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 encumbers him with help?” ”

“ He occupied the illustrious post of Slade Professor of art at Oxford when convocation voted to endow vivisection in the University and install Dr. Burdon Sanderson, the p. 29smotherer 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 ”

“ For instance, if they were dangerous animals, take the case of wild beasts at large, able not only to defend themselves, but even to attack us; much as we might dislike to hear of their wounds and agony, yet our feelings would be of a very different kind, but there is something so very dreadful, so satanic in tormenting those who never have harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence nor defence, that none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of it. ”

“ Those who went before him sought to assist 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. ”

“ 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 . ”

“ 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. ”

“ Two years later at a Meeting at Prince’s Hall on the 26th of June, 1884, with Lord Shaftesbury in the Chair, the Cardinal in a single pregnant sentence dissipated the vivisectors’ p. 15constant careless confusion of the totally different moral acts of killing animals and torturing them.
“It is clear,” he said, “that the words ‘kill and eat,’ and the dominion which the beneficent Maker of all things has given to man over the lower creatures, does not justify the infliction of exquisite torment in the name of Science.” ”

“ And if the knowledge of physiology has p. 44been 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. ”

“ 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 p. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.”
p. 30Evil communications corrupt good manners, and association with vivisection led these dignitaries and editors to flout and insult a man whose shoe strings they were not worthy to tie. ”