I have already recorded in these pages the strenuous opposition to vivisection displayed by the two greatest representatives of the Church of Rome that arose in England in the last century; and to all who adhere to that Church the authority of the two illustrious Cardinals Newman and Manning must be decisive.
The most famous dignitaries of the English Church in the great Victorian age were also as firm in their condemnation of vivisection as were the great Cardinals.
When I was a young man Dean Stanley was the Dean of Westminster, Dean Vaughan was the Master of the Temple, and Liddon Canon of St. Paul’s. These were all men of world-wide distinction. They were men who adorned and made splendid the offices and dignities theyoccupied, their names were familiar in every corner of the land, they lent a lustre to the Church of England, and each of them utterly condemned vivisection.
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.
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. Dean Stanley left behind him a reputation incomparably greater than any occupier of his Deanery that has succeededhim. The same must be conceded to Dean Vaughan at the Temple; and the eloquence of Canon Liddon compelled the absorbed attention of such congregations as are not now collected by the Canons that have followed him. As far as I am aware, none of the successors of these great men have ever helped our cause at all.
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. When we invite them to help us we receive either no reply at all, or a reply that is carefully evasive, or we are damned with faint praise while assured that the writer is too busy to give the subject the attention it needs beforeany public utterance is possible upon it. All of which methods of dealing with the matter display much wisdom of the world and a very human desire to avoid controversy and other uncomfortable mental and epistolary disturbance, but none of the spirit that led Archbishop Temple when he was Bishop of Exeter to stand unflinching on a temperance platform while the publicans pelted him with flour.
Queen Victoria has given her name to a period which has no parallel in magnificence since the days of the great Elizabeth.
The galaxy of great poets, teachers, and philosophers that flourished in the Victorian age cannot be matched in any similar series of years in all the history of the modern world.
With her departure exhaustion seems to have come upon the world of letters for a time, and to the classic glories of the nineteenth century there has succeeded an usurpation of journalists without the splendour of genius or even the distinction of scholarship.
And although we may perhaps recognise in Lord Beaconsfield’s inclusive use of thephrase to her of “we authors, Madam” something of the flattery of the courtier, yet assuredly in all her public addresses to her people there is displayed a fine and biblical simplicity, and a directness of appeal indicative of a noble mind and a great heart.
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.
Worthily then did she reign over the most splendid times of our history.
That she should from the day she ascended the throne to the day of her death forward and abet all the enlargements of the spirit of mercy and pity towards the suffering, whether among man or animals, was inevitable in a nature so benevolent. And it may very well be that in far distant times the rise of humaneness to man and beastwill be regarded as one of the noblest characteristics of her reign.
Her position above controversies precluded her from participating in them, and made it difficult if not impossible for her publicly to espouse the cause of the miserable creatures subjected to nameless sufferings in the laboratories of the scientific. But her sympathy with those who strove and still strive to end those sufferings could not always be concealed, and on a memorable occasion she expressed her concurrence in the efforts of those who desired to see the laws sanctioning such suffering totally abolished and repealed.
Very fitting therefore it is that among those who earnestly condemned vivisection we should include the august name and fame of Queen Victoria.
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. Among religious leaders may be enumerated the following:—
Archbishop McEvilly, of Tuam; Archbishop Crozier, Primate of Ireland; Archbishop Bagshawe; Bishop Westcott, of Durham; Bishop Moule, of Durham;Bishop Harold Browne, of Winchester; Bishop Lord Arthur Hervey, of Bath and Wells; Bishop Ryle, of Liverpool; Bishop Walsham How, of Wakefield; Bishop Ridding, of Southwell; Bishop Moorhouse, of Manchester; Bishop Mackarness, of Oxford; Bishop Chinnery-Haldane, of Argyll and the Isles; Bishop Barry, Primate of Australia; Dean Kichten. Archdeacon Wilberforce; Father Ignatius; General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army; Spurgeon; Hugh Price Hughes; Newman Hall; James Martineau; Stopford Brooke.
Among prominent teachers and scholars and philosophers and writers and artists and lawyers I find the following:—
Alfred Russel Wallace, Freeman, Froude, Leslie Stephen, Richard Holt Hutton, Sir Henry Taylor, Sir Lewis Morris, George Macdonald, Blackmore, Wilkie Collins, “Lewis Carroll,” Robert Buchanan, Justin McCarthy, Sir Arthur Arnold, Mrs. Somerville, Julia Wedgwood, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Sir Henry Irving,Lord Brampton (Mr. Justice Hawkins), and Lord Chief Baron Kelly.
I have made no research for great names in foreign countries, but some of the most illustrious stand prominently before the world representing the three greatest continental races:
Victor Hugo, Wagner, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Rousseau.
Here then I have brought together a very glorious company justifying the title I have affixed to this book.
From this great cloud of witnesses I have omitted all those leaders of thought and morals, “friends of the wise and teachers of the good” supporters of this great cause who are living. I followed a like reserve in my “Memories,” making in them none but passing allusions to famous persons still alive. I do not share the modern journalistic habit of uninvited public intrusion upon living people who may very well be unwilling at the moment to be dragged into controversy or exposed to insult; and every one knows that the vivisectors and their friends have no manners, and flout all the Hague conventions of debate.
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[16]My “Memories,” p. 63
[40]The book had “Leicester” but this was crossed out and “Lichfield” hand-printed in the margin.—DP.