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.

CHAPTER VI: JOHN RUSKIN

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.

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.”

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 for the erection of a laboratory for the vivisector and £2,000 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.

NOTE.—This chapter on Ruskin having appeared as an article in The Animals’ Defender and Zoophilist in March, 1917, and a copy of it having been sent to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the following correspondence ensued:—

Christ Church, Oxford,
March 3rd, 1917.

Dear Sir,—I thank you for sending me the copy of The Zoophilist.  May I point out that it is not customary for the Vice-Chancellor to read to Convocation the letters of Professors who resign, or to print the letters in the Gazette?

Yours very truly,
T. B. Strong.

Hon. Stephen Coleridge.

South Wales Circuit,
Assize Court, Cardiff,
March 6th, 1917.

Dear Sir,—I have received your letter of the 3rd of March informing me that it is not customary for the Vice-Chancellor to read to Convocation the letters of professors who resign or to print such letters in the University Gazette, but I do not understand from you that the Vice-Chancellor is precluded by any rule of Convocation from reading such a letter, or that the editor if there be one of the University Gazette is unable by any rule of his office to admit such a letter to his columns—and I therefore feel that I was quite entitled to make the comments I did in The Animals’ Defender and Zoophilist.  When such a man as Ruskin desired the reasons for his resignation to be made

clear, I take leave to think that the breach of a custom that enabled the University to conceal those reasons and even permit misapprehensions of those reasons to be given a wide publicity, would have been better than its observance.  And a University Gazette that refuses to publish the letter of a world-famous professor of that University, must arrogate to itself a title to which it can justly make no claim.

Very truly yours,
Stephen