href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@26074@[email protected]#footnote40" class="citation pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[40] with an uncouth figure and an undistinguished countenance, he rose by the massive force of his character and the tireless persistence of his industry to an unchallenged supremacy in the literary world of his age, displaying in his whole life the truth of his own dictum that “few things are impossible to diligence and skill.”  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 was not very patient with the stupid, or merciful to the absurd, and vanity never came into his presence without receiving swift and mortal blows; but the chastisement of his caustic tongue never fell upon modest worth, and there never lived a man who was a more faithful and affectionate friend.

The style of his writing is always balanced and sonorous, and everywhere and always is he “the friend of the wise and teacher of the good.”

No man was more ready to give forcible expression to his amusing prejudices, as when he exclaimed that “the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England,” but to be able to assert of any act of man that Dr. Johnson in solemn seriousness condemned it, is for ever to arraign that act in the court of human morals; and so the judicious must concede that when his authority can be cited in fierce and glowing denunciation of vivisectors they are left in a demersed condition.

I took occasion when giving evidence before the last Royal Commission on Vivisection to rehearse Dr. Johnson’s philippic which I now reproduce below, and the dejected and deflated aspect of the vivisectors on the commission when I had finished it caused that moment to be one of those I shall always recall with exhilaration!  Not a word had one of them to say while I waited for any comment they might adventure, and after a diverting and eloquent silence Lord Selby from the chair remarked, “That leaves no doubt about Dr. Johnson’s view in his day.”  It most certainly does not!

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; to try how long life may be continued in various degrees of mutilation, or with the excision or laceration of the vital parts; to examine

whether burning irons are felt more acutely by the bone or tendon; and whether the more lasting agonies are produced by poison forced into the mouth, or injected into the veins, it is not without reluctance that I offend the sensibility of the tender mind with images like these.  If such cruelties were not practised it were to be desired that they should not be conceived; but, since they are published every day with ostentation, let me be allowed once to mention them, since I mention them with abhorrence.  Mead has invidiously remarked of Woodward that he gathered shells and stones, and would pass for a philosopher.  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.  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.  And if the knowledge of physiology has

been 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.

CHAPTER VIII: THOMAS CARLYLE
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY

The world of letters and of ethics has hardly yet settled whether much of the teaching of the Sage of Chelsea should be the subject of praise or blame.

In the advocacy of fine principles of conduct set forth for us in language of surpassing eloquence and earnest conviction in many a page of “Sartor Resartus,” and scattered through innumerable pamphlets, Carlyle commands the fervent adhesion of the honest, the brave, and the good; while in other parts of his writings his infatuated admiration of force, however clothed with brutality, and of strength, however marred with mendacity, are calculated

as deeply to alienate the urbane man of the world as the austere Christian.

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.

When something was said to Carlyle about the likelihood of the Dean of Westminster recognising his fame as justifying his interment in the Abbey, the rugged old man exclaimed, “Deliver me from that body-snatcher.”  It would have been more to the purpose if he had been delivered from his intimate friend as his biographer!

That Carlyle detested vivisection, however,

must ever remain a great tribute both to him and to our cause.  Many circumstances of the man and his teaching might have led the world to anticipate that he would very likely be found indifferent on the subject.  His earnest adhesion to our principles leaves those who politely call us old women of both sexes in a foolish case, for nothing could be more divertingly absurd than so to classify Carlyle.

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