TRADE UNIONISM AND SCIENCE

Here we have the explanation of the savage rancor that so amazes
people who imagine that the controversy concerning vaccination is
a scientific one. It has really nothing to do with science. The
medical profession, consisting for the most part of very poor men
struggling to keep up appearances beyond their means, find
themselves threatened with the extinction of a considerable part
of their incomes: a part, too, that is easily and regularly
earned, since it is independent of disease, and brings every
person born into the nation, healthy or not, to the doctors. To
boot, there is the occasional windfall of an epidemic, with its
panic and rush for revaccination. Under such circumstances,
vaccination would be defended desperately were it twice as dirty,
dangerous, and unscientific in method as it actually is. The note
of fury in the defence, the feeling that the anti-vaccinator is
doing a cruel, ruinous, inconsiderate thing in a mood of
indignant folly: all this, so puzzling to the observer who knows
nothing of the economic side of the question, and only sees that
the anti-vaccinator, having nothing whatever to gain and a good
deal to lose by placing himself in opposition to the law and to
the outcry that adds private persecution to legal penalties, can
have no interest in the matter except the interest of a reformer
in abolishing a corrupt and mischievous superstition, becomes
intelligible the moment the tragedy of medical poverty and the
lucrativeness of cheap vaccination is taken into account.

In the face of such economic pressure as this, it is silly to
expect that medical teaching, any more than medical practice, can
possibly be scientific. The test to which all methods of
treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to
doctors or not. It would be difficult to cite any proposition
less obnoxious to science, than that advanced by Hahnemann: to
wit, that drugs which in large doses produce certain symptoms,
counteract them in very small doses, just as in more modern
practice it is found that a sufficiently small inoculation with
typhoid rallies our powers to resist the disease instead of
prostrating us with it. But Hahnemann and his followers were
frantically persecuted for a century by generations of
apothecary-doctors whose incomes depended on the quantity of
drugs they could induce their patients to swallow. These two
cases of ordinary vaccination and homeopathy are typical of all
the rest. Just as the object of a trade union under existing
conditions must finally be, not to improve the technical quality
of the work done by its members, but to secure a living wage for
them, so the object of the medical profession today is to secure
an income for the private doctor; and to this consideration all
concern for science and public health must give way when the two
come into conflict. Fortunately they are not always in conflict.
Up to a certain point doctors, like carpenters and masons, must
earn their living by doing the work that the public wants from
them; and as it is not in the nature of things possible that such
public want should be based on unmixed disutility, it may be
admitted that doctors have their uses, real as well as imaginary.
But just as the best carpenter or mason will resist the
introduction of a machine that is likely to throw him out of
work, or the public technical education of unskilled laborers'
sons to compete with him, so the doctor will resist with all his
powers of persecution every advance of science that threatens his
income. And as the advance of scientific hygiene tends to make
the private doctor's visits rarer, and the public inspector's
frequenter, whilst the advance of scientific therapeutics is in
the direction of treatments that involve highly organized
laboratories, hospitals, and public institutions generally, it
unluckily happens that the organization of private practitioners
which we call the medical profession is coming more and more to
represent, not science, but desperate and embittered antiscience:
a statement of things which is likely to get worse until the
average doctor either depends upon or hopes for an appointment in
the public health service for his livelihood.

So much for our guarantees as to medical science. Let us now deal
with the more painful subject of medical kindness.


DOCTORS AND VIVISECTION

The importance to our doctors of a reputation for the tenderest
humanity is so obvious, and the quantity of benevolent work
actually done by them for nothing (a great deal of it from sheer
good nature) so large, that at first sight it seems unaccountable
that they should not only throw all their credit away, but
deliberately choose to band themselves publicly with outlaws and
scoundrels by claiming that in the pursuit of their professional
knowledge they should be free from the restraints of law, of
honor, of pity, of remorse, of everything that distinguishes an
orderly citizen from a South Sea buccaneer, or a philosopher from
an inquisitor. For here we look in vain for either an economic or
a sentimental motive. In every generation fools and blackguards
have made this claim; and honest and reasonable men, led by the
strongest contemporary minds, have repudiated it and exposed its
crude rascality. From Shakespear and Dr. Johnson to Ruskin and
Mark Twain, the natural abhorrence of sane mankind for the
vivisector's cruelty, and the contempt of able thinkers for his
imbecile casuistry, have been expressed by the most popular
spokesmen of humanity. If the medical profession were to outdo
the Anti-Vivisection Societies in a general professional protest
against the practice and principles of the vivisectors, every
doctor in the kingdom would gain substantially by the immense
relief and reconciliation which would follow such a reassurance
of the humanity of the doctor. Not one doctor in a thousand is a
vivisector, or has any interest in vivisection, either pecuniary
or intellectual, or would treat his dog cruelly or allow anyone
else to do it. It is true that the doctor complies with the
professional fashion of defending vivisection, and assuring you
that people like Shakespear and Dr. Johnson and Ruskin and Mark
Twain are ignorant sentimentalists, just as he complies with any
other silly fashion: the mystery is, how it became the fashion in
spite of its being so injurious to those who follow it. Making
all possible allowance for the effect of the brazen lying of the
few men who bring a rush of despairing patients to their doors by
professing in letters to the newspapers to have learnt from
vivisection how to cure certain diseases, and the assurances of
the sayers of smooth things that the practice is quite painless
under the law, it is still difficult to find any civilized motive
for an attitude by which the medical profession has everything to
lose and nothing to gain.


THE PRIMITIVE SAVAGE MOTIVE

I say civilized motive advisedly; for primitive tribal motives
are easy enough to find. Every savage chief who is not a Mahomet
learns that if he wishes to strike the imagination of his tribe--
and without doing that he can rule them--he must terrify or
revolt them from time to time by acts of hideous cruelty or
disgusting unnaturalness. We are far from being as superior to
such tribes as we imagine. It is very doubtful indeed whether
Peter the Great could have effected the changes he made in Russia
if he had not fascinated and intimidated his people by his
monstrous cruelties and grotesque escapades. Had he been a
nineteenth-century king of England, he would have had to wait for
some huge accidental calamity: a cholera epidemic, a war, or an
insurrection, before waking us up sufficiently to get anything
done. Vivisection helps the doctor to rule us as Peter ruled the
Russians. The notion that the man who does dreadful things is
superhuman, and that therefore he can also do wonderful things
either as ruler, avenger, healer, or what not, is by no means
confined to barbarians. Just as the manifold wickednesses and
stupidities of our criminal code are supported, not by any
general comprehension of law or study of jurisprudence, not even
by simple vindictiveness, but by the superstition that a calamity
of any sort must be expiated by a human sacrifice; so the
wickednesses and stupidities of our medicine men are rooted in
superstitions that have no more to do with science than the
traditional ceremony of christening an ironclad has to do with
the effectiveness of its armament. We have only to turn to
Macaulay's description of the treatment of Charles II in his last
illness to see how strongly his physicians felt that their only
chance of cheating death was by outraging nature in tormenting
and disgusting their unfortunate patient. True, this was more
than two centuries ago; but I have heard my own nineteenth-
century grandfather describe the cupping and firing and nauseous
medicines of his time with perfect credulity as to their
beneficial effects; and some more modern treatments appear to me
quite as barbarous. It is in this way that vivisection pays the
doctor. It appeals to the fear and credulity of the savage in us;
and without fear and credulity half the private doctor's
occupation and seven-eighths of his influence would be gone.


THE HIGHER MOTIVE. THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

But the greatest force of all on the side of vivisection is the
mighty and indeed divine force of curiosity. Here we have no
decaying tribal instinct which men strive to root out of
themselves as they strive to root out the tiger's lust for blood.
On the contrary, the curiosity of the ape, or of the child who
pulls out the legs and wings of a fly to see what it will do
without them, or who, on being told that a cat dropped out of the
window will always fall on its legs, immediately tries the
experiment on the nearest cat from the highest window in the
house (I protest I did it myself from the first floor only), is
as nothing compared to the thirst for knowledge of the
philosopher, the poet, the biologist, and the naturalist. I have
always despised Adam because he had to be tempted by the woman,
as she was by the serpent, before he could he induced to pluck
the apple from the tree of knowledge. I should have swallowed
every apple on the tree the moment the owner's back was turned.
When Gray said "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise,"
he forgot that it is godlike to be wise; and since nobody wants
bliss particularly, or could stand more than a very brief taste
of it if it were attainable, and since everybody, by the deepest
law of the Life Force, desires to be godlike, it is stupid, and
indeed blasphemous and despairing, to hope that the thirst for
knowledge will either diminish or consent to be subordinated to
any other end whatsoever. We shall see later on that the claim
that has arisen in this way for the unconditioned pursuit of
knowledge is as idle as all dreams of unconditioned activity; but
none the less the right to knowledge must be regarded as a
fundamental human right. The fact that men of science have had to
fight so hard to secure its recognition, and are still so
vigorously persecuted when they discover anything that is not
quite palatable to vulgar people, makes them sorely jealous for
that right; and when they hear a popular outcry for the
suppression of a method of research which has an air of being
scientific, their first instinct is to rally to the defence of
that method without further consideration, with the result that
they sometimes, as in the case of vivisection, presently find
themselves fighting on a false issue.


THE FLAW IN THE ARGUMENT

I may as well pause here to explain their error. The right to
know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and
unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a
desirable thing, though any fool can prove that ignorance is
bliss, and that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" (a
little being the most that any of us can attain), as easily as
that the pains of life are more numerous and constant than its
pleasures, and that therefore we should all be better dead. The
logic is unimpeachable; but its only effect is to make us say
that if these are the conclusions logic leads to, so much the
worse for logic, after which curt dismissal of Folly, we continue
living and learning by instinct: that is, as of right. We
legislate on the assumption that no man may be killed on the
strength of a demonstration that he would be happier in his
grave, not even if he is dying slowly of cancer and begs the
doctor to despatch him quickly and mercifully. To get killed
lawfully he must violate somebody else's right to live by
committing murder. But he is by no means free to live
unconditionally. In society he can exercise his right to live
only under very stiff conditions. In countries where there is
compulsory military service he may even have to throw away his
individual life to save the life of the community.

It is just so in the case of the right to knowledge. It is a
right that is as yet very imperfectly recognized in practice. But
in theory it is admitted that an adult person in pursuit of
knowledge must not be refused it on the ground that he would be
better or happier without it. Parents and priests may forbid
knowledge to those who accept their authority; and social taboo
may be made effective by acts of legal persecution under cover of
repressing blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition; but no government
now openly forbids its subjects to pursue knowledge on the ground
that knowledge is in itself a bad thing, or that it is possible
for any of us to have too much of it.


LIMITATIONS OF THE RIGHT TO KNOWLEDGE

But neither does any government exempt the pursuit of knowledge,
any more than the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness (as the
American Constitution puts it), from all social conditions. No
man is allowed to put his mother into the stove because he
desires to know how long an adult woman will survive at a
temperature of 500 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter how important or
interesting that particular addition to the store of human
knowledge may be. A man who did so would have short work made not
only of his right to knowledge, but of his right to live and all
his other rights at the same time. The right to knowledge is not
the only right; and its exercise must be limited by respect for
other rights, and for its own exercise by others. When a man says
to Society, "May I torture my mother in pursuit of knowledge?"
Society replies, "No." If he pleads, "What! Not even if I have a
chance of finding out how to cure cancer by doing it?" Society
still says, "Not even then." If the scientist, making the best of
his disappointment, goes on to ask may he torture a dog, the
stupid and callous people who do not realize that a dog is a
fellow-creature and sometimes a good friend, may say Yes, though
Shakespear, Dr. Johnson and their like may say No. But even those
who say "You may torture A dog" never say "You may torture MY
dog." And nobody says, "Yes, because in the pursuit of knowledge
you may do as you please." Just as even the stupidest people say,
in effect, "If you cannot attain to knowledge without burning
your mother you must do without knowledge," so the wisest people
say, "If you cannot attain to knowledge without torturing a dog,
you must do without knowledge."


A FALSE ALTERNATIVE

But in practice you cannot persuade any wise man that this
alternative can ever be forced on anyone but a fool, or that a
fool can be trusted to learn anything from any experiment, cruel
or humane. The Chinaman who burnt down his house to roast his pig
was no doubt honestly unable to conceive any less disastrous way
of cooking his dinner; and the roast must have been spoiled after
all (a perfect type of the average vivisectionist experiment);
but this did not prove that the Chinaman was right: it only
proved that the Chinaman was an incapable cook and,
fundamentally, a fool.

Take another celebrated experiment: one in sanitary reform. In
the days of Nero Rome was in the same predicament as London to-
day. If some one would burn down London, and it were rebuilt, as
it would now have to be, subject to the sanitary by-laws and
Building Act provisions enforced by the London County Council, it
would be enormously improved; and the average lifetime of
Londoners would be considerably prolonged. Nero argued in the
same way about Rome. He employed incendiaries to set it on fire;
and he played the harp in scientific raptures whilst it was
burning. I am so far of Nero's way of thinking that I have often
said, when consulted by despairing sanitary reformers, that what
London needs to make her healthy is an earthquake. Why, then, it
may be asked, do not I, as a public-spirited man, employ
incendiaries to set it on fire, with a heroic disregard of the
consequences to myself and others? Any vivisector would, if he
had the courage of his opinions. The reasonable answer is that
London can be made healthy without burning her down; and that as
we have not enough civic virtue to make her healthy in a humane
and economical way, we should not have enough to rebuild her in
that way. In the old Hebrew legend, God lost patience with the
world as Nero did with Rome, and drowned everybody except a
single family. But the result was that the progeny of that family
reproduced all the vices of their predecessors so exactly that
the misery caused by the flood might just as well have been
spared: things went on just as they did before. In the same way,
the lists of diseases which vivisection claims to have cured is
long; but the returns of the Registrar-General show that people
still persist in dying of them as if vivisection had never been
heard of. Any fool can burn down a city or cut an animal open;
and an exceptionally foolish fool is quite likely to promise
enormous benefits to the race as the result of such activities.
But when the constructive, benevolent part of the business comes
to be done, the same want of imagination, the same stupidity and
cruelty, the same laziness and want of perseverance that
prevented Nero or the vivisector from devising or pushing through
humane methods, prevents him from bringing order out of the chaos
and happiness out of the misery he has made. At one time it
seemed reasonable enough to declare that it was impossible to
find whether or not there was a stone inside a man's body except
by exploring it with a knife, or to find out what the sun is
made of without visiting it in a balloon. Both these
impossibilities have been achieved, but not by vivisectors. The
Rontgen rays need not hurt the patient; and spectrum analysis
involves no destruction. After such triumphs of humane experiment
and reasoning, it is useless to assure us that there is no other
key to knowledge except cruelty. When the vivisector offers us
that assurance, we reply simply and contemptuously, "You mean
that you are not clever or humane or energetic enough to find
one."

CRUELTY FOR ITS OWN SAKE

It will now, I hope, be clear why the attack on vivisection is
not an attack on the right to knowledge: why, indeed, those who
have the deepest conviction of the sacredness of that right are
the leaders of the attack. No knowledge is finally impossible of
human attainment; for even though it may be beyond our present
capacity, the needed capacity is not unattainable. Consequently
no method of investigation is the only method; and no law
forbidding any particular method can cut us off from the
knowledge we hope to gain by it. The only knowledge we lose by
forbidding cruelty is knowledge at first hand of cruelty itself,
which is precisely the knowledge humane people wish to be spared.

But the question remains: Do we all really wish to be spared that
knowledge? Are humane methods really to be preferred to cruel
ones? Even if the experiments come to nothing, may not their
cruelty be enjoyed for its own sake, as a sensational luxury? Let
us face these questions boldly, not shrinking from the fact that
cruelty is one of the primitive pleasures of mankind, and that
the detection of its Protean disguises as law, education,
medicine, discipline, sport and so forth, is one of the most
difficult of the unending tasks of the legislator.


OUR OWN CRUELTIES

At first blush it may seem not only unnecessary, but even
indecent, to discuss such a proposition as the elevation of
cruelty to the rank of a human right. Unnecessary, because no
vivisector confesses to a love of cruelty for its own sake or
claims any general fundamental right to be cruel. Indecent,
because there is an accepted convention to repudiate cruelty; and
vivisection is only tolerated by the law on condition that, like
judicial torture, it shall be done as mercifully as the nature of
the practice allows. But the moment the controversy becomes
embittered, the recriminations bandied between the opposed
parties bring us face-to-face with some very ugly truths. On one
occasion I was invited to speak at a large Anti-Vivisection
meeting in the Queen's Hall in London. I found myself on the
platform with fox hunters, tame stag hunters, men and women whose
calendar was divided, not by pay days and quarter days, but by
seasons for killing animals for sport: the fox, the hare, the
otter, the partridge and the rest having each its appointed date
for slaughter. The ladies among us wore hats and cloaks and head-
dresses obtained by wholesale massacres, ruthless trappings,
callous extermination of our fellow creatures. We insisted on our
butchers supplying us with white veal, and were large and
constant consumers of pate de foie gras; both comestibles being
obtained by revolting methods. We sent our sons to public schools
where indecent flogging is a recognized method of taming the
young human animal. Yet we were all in hysterics of indignation
at the cruelties of the vivisectors. These, if any were present,
must have smiled sardonically at such inhuman humanitarians,
whose daily habits and fashionable amusements cause more
suffering in England in a week than all the vivisectors of Europe
do in a year. I made a very effective speech, not exclusively
against vivisection, but against cruelty; and I have never been
asked to speak since by that Society, nor do I expect to be, as I
should probably give such offence to its most affluent
subscribers that its attempts to suppress vivisection would be
seriously hindered. But that does not prevent the vivisectors
from freely using the "youre another" retort, and using it with
justice.

We must therefore give ourselves no airs of superiority when
denouncing the cruelties of vivisection. We all do just as
horrible things, with even less excuse. But in making that
admission we are also making short work of the virtuous airs with
which we are sometimes referred to the humanity of the medical
profession as a guarantee that vivisection is not abused--much as
if our burglars should assure us that they arc too honest to
abuse the practice of burgling. We are, as a matter of fact, a
cruel nation; and our habit of disguising our vices by giving
polite names to the offences we are determined to commit does
not, unfortunately for my own comfort, impose on me. Vivisectors
can hardly pretend to be better than the classes from which they
are drawn, or those above them; and if these classes are capable
of sacrificing animals in various cruel ways under cover of
sport, fashion, education, discipline, and even, when the cruel
sacrifices are human sacrifices, of political economy, it is idle
for the vivisector to pretend that he is incapable of practising
cruelty for pleasure or profit or both under the cloak of
science. We are all tarred with the same brush; and the
vivisectors are not slow to remind us of it, and to protest
vehemently against being branded as exceptionally cruel and its
devisors of horrible instruments of torture by people whose main
notion of enjoyment is cruel sport, and whose requirements in the
way of villainously cruel traps occupy pages of the catalogue of
the Army and Navy Stores.


THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION OF CRUELTY

There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even
his passion of pity and makes it savage. Simple disgust at
cruelty is very rare. The people who turn sick and faint and
those who gloat are often alike in the pains they take to witness
executions, floggings, operations or any other exhibitions of
suffering, especially those involving bloodshed, blows, and
laceration. A craze for cruelty can be developed just as a craze
for drink can; and nobody who attempts to ignore cruelty as a
possible factor in the attraction of vivisection and even of
antivivisection, or in the credulity with which we accept its
excuses, can be regarded as a scientific investigator of it.
Those who accuse vivisectors of indulging the well-known passion
of cruelty under the cloak of research are therefore putting
forward a strictly scientific psychological hypothesis, which is
also simple, human, obvious, and probable. It may be as wounding
to the personal vanity of the vivisector as Darwin's Origin of
Species was to the people who could not bear to think that they
were cousins to the monkeys (remember Goldsmith's anger when he
was told that he could not move his upper jaw); but science has
to consider only the truth of the hypothesis, and not whether
conceited people will like it or not. In vain do the sentimental
champions of vivisection declare themselves the most humane of
men, inflicting suffering only to relieve it, scrupulous in the
use of anesthetics, and void of all passion except the passion of
pity for a disease-ridden world. The really scientific
investigator answers that the question cannot be settled by
hysterical protestations, and that if the vivisectionist rejects
deductive reasoning, he had better clear his character by his own
favorite method of experiment.

SUGGESTED LABORATORY TESTS OF THE VIVISECTOR'S EMOTIONS

Take the hackneyed case of the Italian who tortured mice,
ostensibly to find out about the effects of pain rather less than
the nearest dentist could have told him, and who boasted of the
ecstatic sensations (he actually used the word love) with which
he carried out his experiments. Or the gentleman who starved
sixty dogs to death to establish the fact that a dog deprived of
food gets progressively lighter and weaker, becoming remarkably
emaciated, and finally dying: an undoubted truth, but
ascertainable without laboratory experiments by a simple enquiry
addressed to the nearest policeman, or, failing him, to any sane
person in Europe. The Italian is diagnosed as a cruel voluptuary:
the dog-starver is passed over as such a hopeless fool that it is
impossible to take any interest in him. Why not test the
diagnosis scientifically? Why not perform a careful series of
experiments on persons under the influence of voluptuous ecstasy,
so as to ascertain its physiological symptoms? Then perform a
second series on persons engaged in mathematical work or machine
designing, so as to ascertain the symptoms of cold scientific
activity? Then note the symptoms of a vivisector performing a
cruel experiment; and compare them with the voluptuary symptoms
and the mathematical symptoms? Such experiments would be quite as
interesting and important as any yet undertaken by the
vivisectors. They might open a line of investigation which would
finally make, for instance, the ascertainment of the guilt or
innocence of an accused person a much exacter process than the
very fallible methods of our criminal courts. But instead of
proposing such an investigation, our vivisectors offer us all the
pious protestations and all the huffy recriminations that any
common unscientific mortal offers when he is accused of unworthy
conduct.


ROUTINE

Yet most vivisectors would probably come triumphant out of such a
series of experiments, because vivisection is now a routine, like
butchering or hanging or flogging; and many of the men who
practise it do so only because it has been established as part of
the profession they have adopted. Far from enjoying it, they have
simply overcome their natural repugnance and become indifferent
to it, as men inevitably become indifferent to anything they do
often enough. It is this dangerous power of custom that makes it
so difficult to convince the common sense of mankind that any
established commercial or professional practice has its root in
passion. Let a routine once spring from passion, and you will
presently find thousands of routineers following it passionlessly
for a livelihood. Thus it always seems strained to speak of the
religious convictions of a clergyman, because nine out of ten
clergymen have no religions convictions: they are ordinary
officials carrying on a routine of baptizing, marrying, and
churching; praying, reciting, and preaching; and, like solicitors
or doctors, getting away from their duties with relief to hunt,
to garden, to keep bees, to go into society, and the like. In the
same way many people do cruel and vile things without being in
the least cruel or vile, because the routine to which they have
been brought up is superstitiously cruel and vile. To say that
every man who beats his children and every schoolmaster who flogs
a pupil is a conscious debauchee is absurd: thousands of dull,
conscientious people beat their children conscientiously, because
they were beaten themselves and think children ought to be
beaten. The ill-tempered vulgarity that instinctively strikes at
and hurts a thing that annoys it (and all children are annoying),
and the simple stupidity that requires from a child perfection
beyond the reach of the wisest and best adults (perfect
truthfulness coupled with perfect obedience is quite a common
condition of leaving a child unwhipped), produce a good deal of
flagellation among people who not only do not lust after it, but
who hit the harder because they are angry at having to perform an
uncomfortable duty. These people will beat merely to assert their
authority, or to carry out what they conceive to be a divine
order on the strength of the precept of Solomon recorded in the
Bible, which carefully adds that Solomon completely spoilt his
own son and turned away from the god of his fathers to the
sensuous idolatry in which he ended his days.

In the same way we find men and women practising vivisection as
senselessly as a humane butcher, who adores his fox terrier, will
cut a calf's throat and hang it up by its heels to bleed slowly
to death because it is the custom to eat veal and insist on its
being white; or as a German purveyor nails a goose to a board and
stuffs it with food because fashionable people eat pate de foie
gras; or as the crew of a whaler breaks in on a colony of seals
and clubs them to death in wholesale massacre because ladies want
sealskin jackets; or as fanciers blind singing birds with hot
needles, and mutilate the ears and tails of dogs and horses. Let
cruelty or kindness or anything else once become customary and it
will be practised by people to whom it is not at all natural, but
whose rule of life is simply to do only what everybody else does,
and who would lose their employment and starve if they indulged
in any peculiarity. A respectable man will lie daily, in speech
and in print, about the qualities of the article he lives by
selling, because it is customary to do so. He will flog his boy
for telling a lie, because it is customary to do so. He will also
flog him for not telling a lie if the boy tells inconvenient or
disrespectful truths, because it is customary to do so. He will
give the same boy a present on his birthday, and buy him a spade
and bucket at the seaside, because it is customary to do so,
being all the time neither particularly mendacious, nor
particularly cruel, nor particularly generous, but simply
incapable of ethical judgment or independent action.

Just so do we find a crowd of petty vivisectionists daily
committing atrocities and stupidities, because it is the custom
to do so. Vivisection is customary as part of the routine of
preparing lectures in medical schools. For instance, there are
two ways of making the action of the heart visible to students.
One, a barbarous, ignorant, and thoughtless way, is to stick
little flags into a rabbit's heart and let the students see the
flags jump. The other, an elegant, ingenious, well-informed, and
instructive way, is to put a sphygmograph on the student's wrist
and let him see a record of his heart's action traced by a needle
on a slip of smoked paper. But it has become the custom for
lecturers to teach from the rabbit; and the lecturers are not
original enough to get out of their groove. Then there are the
demonstrations which are made by cutting up frogs with scissors.
The most humane man, however repugnant the operation may be to
him at first, cannot do it at lecture after lecture for months
without finally--and that very soon--feeling no more for the frog
than if he were cutting up pieces of paper. Such clumsy and lazy
ways of teaching are based on the cheapness of frogs and rabbits.
If machines were as cheap as frogs, engineers would not only be
taught the anatomy of machines and the functions of their parts:
they would also have machines misused and wrecked before them so
that they might learn as much as possible by using their eyes,
and as little as possible by using their brains and imaginations.
Thus we have, as part of the routine of teaching, a routine of
vivisection which soon produces complete indifference to it on
the part even of those who are naturally humane. If they pass on
from the routine of lecture preparation, not into general
practice, but into research work, they carry this acquired
indifference with them into the laboratory, where any atrocity is
possible, because all atrocities satisfy curiosity. The routine
man is in the majority in his profession always: consequently the
moment his practice is tracked down to its source in human
passion there is a great and quite sincere poohpoohing from
himself, from the mass of the profession, and from the mass of
the public, which sees that the average doctor is much too
commonplace and decent a person to be capable of passionate
wickedness of any kind.

Here then, we have in vivisection, as in all the other tolerated
and instituted cruelties, this anti-climax: that only a
negligible percentage of those who practise and consequently
defend it get any satisfaction out of it. As in Mr. Galsworthy's
play Justice the useless and detestable torture of solitary
imprisonment is shown at its worst without the introduction of a
single cruel person into the drama, so it would be possible to
represent all the torments of vivisection dramatically without
introducing a single vivisector who had not felt sick at his
first experience in the laboratory. Not that this can exonerate
any vivisector from suspicion of enjoying his work (or her work:
a good deal of the vivisection in medical schools is done by
women). In every autobiography which records a real experience of
school or prison life, we find that here and there among the
routineers there is to be found the genuine amateur, the
orgiastic flogging schoolmaster or the nagging warder, who has
sought out a cruel profession for the sake of its cruelty. But it
is the genuine routineer who is the bulwark of the practice,
because, though you can excite public fury against a Sade, a
Bluebeard, or a Nero, you cannot rouse any feeling against dull
Mr. Smith doing his duty: that is, doing the usual thing. He is
so obviously no better and no worse than anyone else that it is
difficult to conceive that the things he does are abominable. If
you would see public dislike surging up in a moment against an
individual, you must watch one who does something unusual, no
matter how sensible it may be. The name of Jonas Hanway lives as
that of a brave man because he was the first who dared to appear
in the streets of this rainy island with an umbrella.


THE OLD LINE BETWEEN MAN AND BEAST

But there is still a distinction to be clung to by those who dare
not tell themselves the truth about the medical profession
because they are so helplessly dependent on it when death
threatens the household. That distinction is the line that
separates the brute from the man in the old classification.
Granted, they will plead, that we are all cruel; yet the tame-
stag-hunter does not hunt men; and the sportsman who lets a leash
of greyhounds loose on a hare would be horrified at the thought
of letting them loose on a human child. The lady who gets her
cloak by flaying a sable does not flay a negro; nor does it ever
occur to her that her veal cutlet might be improved on by a slice
of tender baby.

Now there was a time when some trust could be placed in this
distinction. The Roman Catholic Church still maintains, with what
it must permit me to call a stupid obstinacy, and in spite of St.
Francis and St. Anthony, that animals have no souls and no
rights; so that you cannot sin against an animal, or against God
by anything you may choose to do to an animal. Resisting the
temptation to enter on an argument as to whether you may not sin
against your own soul if you are unjust or cruel to the least of
those whom St. Francis called his little brothers, I have only to
point out here that nothing could be more despicably
superstitious in the opinion of a vivisector than the notion that
science recognizes any such step in evolution as the step from a
physical organism to an immortal soul. That conceit has been
taken out of all our men of science, and out of all our doctors,
by the evolutionists; and when it is considered how completely
obsessed biological science has become in our days, not by the
full scope of evolution, but by that particular method of it
which has neither sense nor purpose nor life nor anything human,
much less godlike, in it: by the method, that is, of so-called
Natural Selection (meaning no selection at all, but mere dead
accident and luck), the folly of trusting to vivisectors to hold
the human animal any more sacred than the other animals becomes
so clear that it would be waste of time to insist further on it.
As a matter of fact the man who once concedes to the vivisector
the right to put a dog outside the laws of honor and fellowship,
concedes to him also the right to put himself outside them; for
he is nothing to the vivisector but a more highly developed, and
consequently more interesting-to-experiment-on vertebrate than
the dog.


VIVISECTING THE HUMAN SUBJECT

I have in my hand a printed and published account by a doctor of
how he tested his remedy for pulmonary tuberculosis, which was to
inject a powerful germicide directly into the circulation by
stabbing a vein with a syringe. He was one of those doctors who
are able to command public sympathy by saying, quite truly, that
when they discovered that the proposed treatment was dangerous,
they experimented thenceforth on themselves. In this case the
doctor was devoted enough to carry his experiments to the point
of running serious risks, and actually making himself very
uncomfortable. But he did not begin with himself. His first
experiment was on two hospital patients. On receiving a message
from the hospital to the effect that these two martyrs to
therapeutic science had all but expired in convulsions, he
experimented on a rabbit, which instantly dropped dead. It was
then, and not until then, that he began to experiment on himself,
with the germicide modified in the direction indicated by the
experiments made on the two patients and the rabbit. As a good
many people countenance vivisection because they fear that if the
experiments are not made on rabbits they will be made on
themselves, it is worth noting that in this case, where both
rabbits and men were equally available, the men, being, of
course, enormously more instructive, and costing nothing, were
experimented on first. Once grant the ethics of the
vivisectionists and you not only sanction the experiment on the
human subject, but make it the first duty of the vivisector. If a
guinea pig may be sacrificed for the sake of the very little that
can be learnt from it, shall not a man be sacrificed for the sake
of the great deal that can be learnt from him? At all events, he
is sacrificed, as this typical case shows. I may add (not that it
touches the argument) that the doctor, the patients, and the
rabbit all suffered in vain, as far as the hoped-for rescue of
the race from pulmonary consumption is concerned.


"THE LIE IS A EUROPEAN POWER"

Now at the very time when the lectures describing these
experiments were being circulated in print and discussed eagerly
by the medical profession, the customary denials that patients
are experimented on were as loud, as indignant, as high-minded as
ever, in spite of the few intelligent doctors who point out
rightly that all treatments are experiments on the patient. And
this brings us to an obvious but mostly overlooked weakness in
the vivisector's position: that is, his inevitable forfeiture of
all claim to have his word believed. It is hardly to be expected
that a man who does not hesitate to vivisect for the sake of
science will hesitate to lie about it afterwards to protect it
from what he deems the ignorant sentimentality of the laity. When
the public conscience stirs uneasily and threatens suppression,
there is never wanting some doctor of eminent position and high
character who will sacrifice himself devotedly to the cause of
science by coming forward to assure the public on his honor that
all experiments on animals are completely painless; although he
must know that the very experiments which first provoked the
antivivisection movement by their atrocity were experiments to
ascertain the physiological effects of the sensation of extreme
pain (the much more interesting physiology of pleasure remains
uninvestigated) and that all experiments in which sensation is a
factor are voided by its suppression. Besides, vivisection may be
painless in cases where the experiments are very cruel. If a
person scratches me with a poisoned dagger so gently that I do
not feel the scratch, he has achieved a painless vivisection; but
if I presently die in torment I am not likely to consider that
his humility is amply vindicated by his gentleness. A cobra's
bite hurts so little that the creature is almost, legally
speaking, a vivisector who inflicts no pain. By giving his
victims chloroform before biting them he could comply with the
law completely.

Here, then, is a pretty deadlock. Public support of vivisection
is founded almost wholly on the assurances of the vivisectors
that great public benefits may be expected from the practice. Not
for a moment do I suggest that such a defence would be valid even
if proved. But when the witnesses begin by alleging that in the
cause of science all the customary ethical obligations (which
include the obligation to tell the truth) are suspended, what
weight can any reasonable person give to their testimony? I would
rather swear fifty lies than take an animal which had licked my
hand in good fellowship and torture it. If I did torture the dog,
I should certainly not have the face to turn round and ask how
any person there suspect an honorable man like myself of telling
lies. Most sensible and humane people would, I hope, reply flatly
that honorable men do not behave dishonorably, even to dogs. The
murderer who, when asked by the chaplain whether he had any other
crimes to confess, replied indignantly, "What do you take me
for?" reminds us very strongly of the vivisectors who are so
deeply hurt when their evidence is set aside as worthless.


AN ARGUMENT WHICH WOULD DEFEND ANY CRIME

The Achilles heel of vivisection, however, is not to be found in
the pain it causes, but in the line of argument by which it is
justified. The medical code regarding it is simply criminal
anarchism at its very worst. Indeed no criminal has yet had the
impudence to argue as every vivisector argues. No burglar
contends that as it is admittedly important to have money to
spend, and as the object of burglary is to provide the burglar
with money to spend, and as in many instances it has achieved
this object, therefore the burglar is a public benefactor and the
police are ignorant sentimentalists. No highway robber has yet
harrowed us with denunciations of the puling moralist who allows
his child to suffer all the evils of poverty because certain
faddists think it dishonest to garotte an alderman. Thieves and
assassins understand quite well that there are paths of
acquisition, even of the best things, that are barred to all men
of honor. Again, has the silliest burglar ever pretended that to
put a stop to burglary is to put a stop to industry? All the
vivisections that have been performed since the world began have
produced nothing so important as the innocent and honorable
discovery of radiography; and one of the reasons why radiography
was not discovered sooner was that the men whose business it was
to discover new clinical methods were coarsening and stupefying
themselves with the sensual villanies and cutthroat's casuistries
of vivisection. The law of the conservation of energy holds good
in physiology as in other things: every vivisector is a deserter
from the army of honorable investigators. But the vivisector does
not see this. He not only calls his methods scientific: he
contends that there are no other scientific methods. When you
express your natural loathing for his cruelty and your natural
contempt for his stupidity, he imagines that you are attacking
science. Yet he has no inkling of the method and temper of
science. The point at issue being plainly whether he is a rascal
or not, he not only insists that the real point is whether some
hotheaded antivivisectionist is a liar (which he proves by
ridiculously unscientific assumptions as to the degree of
accuracy attainable in human statement), but never dreams of
offering any scientific evidence by his own methods.

There are many paths to knowledge already discovered; and no
enlightened man doubts that there are many more waiting to be
discovered. Indeed, all paths lead to knowledge; because even the
vilest and stupidest action teaches us something about vileness
and stupidity, and may accidentally teach us a good deal more:
for instance, a cutthroat learns (and perhaps teaches) the
anatomy of the carotid artery and jugular vein; and there can be
no question that the burning of St. Joan of Arc must have been a
most instructive and interesting experiment to a good observer,
and could have been made more so if it had been carried out by
skilled physiologists under laboratory conditions. The earthquake
in San Francisco proved invaluable as an experiment in the
stability of giant steel buildings; and the ramming of the
Victoria by the Camperdown settled doubtful points of the
greatest importance in naval warfare. According to vivisectionist
logic our builders would be justified in producing artificial
earthquakes with dynamite, and our admirals in contriving
catastrophes at naval manoeuvres, in order to follow up the line
of research thus accidentally discovered.

The truth is, if the acquisition of knowledge justifies every
sort of conduct, it justifies any sort of conduct, from the
illumination of Nero's feasts by burning human beings alive
(another interesting experiment) to the simplest act of kindness.
And in the light of that truth it is clear that the exemption of
the pursuit of knowledge from the laws of honor is the most
hideous conceivable enlargement of anarchy; worse, by far, than
an exemption of the pursuit of money or political power, since
there can hardly be attained without some regard for at least the
appearances of human welfare, whereas a curious devil might
destroy the whole race in torment, acquiring knowledge all the
time from his highly interesting experiment. There is more danger
in one respectable scientist countenancing such a monstrous claim
than in fifty assassins or dynamitards. The man who makes it is
ethically imbecile; and whoever imagines that it is a scientific
claim has not the faintest conception of what science means. The
paths to knowledge are countless. One of these paths is a path
through darkness, secrecy, and cruelty. When a man deliberately
turns from all other paths and goes down that one, it is
scientific to infer that what attracts him is not knowledge,
since there are other paths to that, but cruelty. With so strong
and scientific a case against him, it is childish for him to
stand on his honor and reputation and high character and the
credit of a noble profession and so forth: he must clear himself
either by reason or by experiment, unless he boldly contends that
evolution has retained a passion of cruelty in man just because
it is indispensable to the fulness of his knowledge.


THOU ART THE MAN

I shall not be at all surprised if what I have written above has
induced in sympathetic readers a transport of virtuous
indignation at the expense of the medical profession. I shall not
damp so creditable and salutary a sentiment; but I must point out
that the guilt is shared by all of us. It is not in his capacity
of healer and man of science that the doctor vivisects or defends
vivisection, but in his entirely vulgar lay capacity. He is made
of the same clay as the ignorant, shallow, credulous, half-
miseducated, pecuniarily anxious people who call him in when they
have tried in vain every bottle and every pill the advertizing
druggist can persuade them to buy. The real remedy for
vivisection is the remedy for all the mischief that the medical
profession and all the other professions are doing: namely, more
knowledge. The juries which send the poor Peculiars to prison,
and give vivisectionists heavy damages against humane persons who
accuse them of cruelty; the editors and councillors and student-
led mobs who are striving to make Vivisection one of the
watchwords of our civilization, are not doctors: they are the
British public, all so afraid to die that they will cling
frantically to any idol which promises to cure all their
diseases, and crucify anyone who tells them that they must not
only die when their time comes, but die like gentlemen. In their
paroxysms of cowardice and selfishness they force the doctors to
humor their folly and ignorance. How complete and inconsiderate
their ignorance is can only be realized by those who have some
knowledge of vital statistics, and of the illusions which beset
Public Health legislation.