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Ebook has 283 lines and 37644 words, and 6 pages

He had laid up his treasure where no rust and moth doth corrupt.

Towards the end of 1874, as I have already remarked, Miss Cobbe prepared a petition to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of which the chief paragraph ran as follows:--

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 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.

Miss Cobbe, confident of what Browning's reply would be, sent him this petition and asked him to return it with his signature if he approved of it.

His reply, which I believe has never as yet been published, redounds to his immortal fame as a man of fortitude and humaneness.

This is what he wrote:

DEAR MISS COBBE,

I return the petition, unsigned for the one good reason--that I have just signed its fellow forwarded to me by Mr. Leslie Stephen.

You have heard "I take an equal interest with yourself in the effort to suppress vivisection"; I dare not so honour my mere wishes and prayers as to put them for a moment beside your noble acts; but, this I know, I would rather submit to the worst of the deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured on the pretence of sparing me a twinge or two. I return the paper, because I shall be probably shut up here for the next week or more, and prevented from seeing my friends: whoever would refuse to sign would certainly not be of the number.

Ever truly--and gratefully yours, ROBERT BROWNING.

Five years later in the volume of Dramatic Idyls issued in 1879, Browning published his poem entitled "Tray" which extols the noble heroism of the dog and leaves nothing to be desired in its biting scorn of the vivisectors:

"'Up he comes with the child, see tight In mouth, alive too, clutched from quite A depth of ten feet--twelve I bet! Good dog! What off again? There's yet Another child to save? All right!

"'How strange we saw no other fall! It's instinct in the animal. Good dog! But he's a long while under: If he got drowned I should not wonder-- Strong current, that against the wall!

"'Here he comes, holds in mouth this time --What may the thing be? Well, that's prime! Now did you ever? Reason reigns In man alone, since all Tray's pains Have fished--the child's doll from the slime!'

"And so, amid the laughter gay, Trotted my hero off,--old Tray,-- Till somebody, prerogatived With reason, reasoned:--'Why he dived His brain would show us, I should say.

Here then is enough to show with what earnest conviction this poet of powerful mind and pure life condemned the practice of vivisection. He was a man who breasted the world with a cheerful philosophy which permitted few external matters to disturb his habitual serenity. But vivisection was one of them, and I have often heard him speak with fierce detestation of what he called "the coward Science."

I do not think he ever addressed a public, or even private, meeting in his life, and that may have left the unlettered world unaware of his deep loathing of the cruelties of the laboratories; but he was one of the earliest Englishmen of unquestioned distinction to join the anti-vivisection movement and to accept the office of Vice-President of our Society.

I venture to think that in aftertimes his sanguine advocacy in this great cause will not be the least of his claims to the gratitude of his fellow men.

I hope that my inclusion of my father in these articles on the first supporters of the anti-vivisection movement will not be thought unbecoming. I see no reason why I should not testify in these pages to the unswerving adhesion he brought to the cause of humaneness both towards men and women as well as towards animals, and the wise counsel he afforded to the pioneers of the fight against vivisection.

It is perhaps now long forgotten that he initiated, drafted and carried through the House of Commons when he sat in that assembly as member for Exeter a Bill emancipating 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 assisted in the efforts to get the Anti-Vivisection Bill of 1876 passed without the wrecking amendments that were at the last minute added to it; after the Bill was passed 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 attitude.

But the last passage 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 endorsement--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 prostitution. 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 compassion upon these, even as I had pity on thee?" So He seems to me to say, and I shall act accordingly.

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. Such pursuits he declared "were all carried on in defiance of what had hitherto been held to be compassion and pity, and of the great link which bound together the whole of creation from its Maker to the lowest creature."

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 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 nobility no more.

Evil 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. 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 encumbered 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 passed since that University thus publicly preferred a dog smootherer to one of the noblest 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 God--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.

Yours very truly, T. B. STRONG.

HON. STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

Very truly yours, STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

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 professorship 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 nobility of disposition by his books?

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

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 "assistants" 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 assistants. 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 assistant at the Brown Institution, and who has publicly declared that "he has no regard at all for the sufferings of the animals."

Your obedient servant, STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

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:

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