THE VIVISECTION QUESTION. 621 



her whelps with his own. Man's first duty is to those of his own 

 species. If wild beasts endanger the life of his wife or child, it 

 becomes his duty to kill them by any means in his power, let the 

 suffering be what it must. This is man's first step in the con- 

 quest of any country. And when he has rid the earth of the 

 fierce carnivora, it becomes his duty to kill such numbers of the 

 herbivora as will enable the rest to obtain food and enjoy life. 

 This surplus man has always utilized for food and clothing. All 

 this, however, is but his first step. He must tend herds and till 

 the soil to support as many as possible of his own species. Even 

 then his work is but just begun. If disease threaten the life of 

 his child, is his duty any different ? Certainly not. It is as 

 much his duty to exterminate the disease as to destroy the wild 

 beast. To subdue the earth, " and have dominion over . . . every 

 living thing that moveth upon the earth," was one of God's first 

 and highest commands to man ; and it includes microbes as well 

 as lions and tigers. 



At just this point we are met with the argument that there is 

 no moral proportion between the amount of suffering caused by 

 vivisection and the advantage gained. " Suppose it is capable of 

 proof," says Lord Coleridge,* "that by putting to death with 

 hideous torment three thousand horses you could find out the 

 real nature of some feverish symptom, I should say, without the 

 least hesitation, that it would be unlawful to torture the horses." 

 Accepting the proportion as stated, we will have : Torture of 

 three thousand horses is to knowledge of real nature of feverish 

 symptom as power gained by such knowledge is to prevention of 

 death annually from splenic fever, we will say, of many millions of 

 cattle, horses, and sheep, and thousands of men in Europe. There 

 is no very exact " proportion " between end and means, but Na- 

 ture is too generous to insist on exact "proportions" when men 

 study her laws aright. 



The difficulty with good people who reason out this "propor- 

 tion " is that they fail to grasp the stupendous size of the prob- 

 lems involved, the whole world over and through all time. France 

 alone is estimated to lose sheep to the value of four million dollars 

 annually from splenic fever, and in one district, Beauce, one hun- 

 dred and eighty-seven thousand sheep are killed annually by it. 

 In Russia, during 1857, it was reported that one hundred thou- 

 sand horses perished from the disease. In other epidemics, the 

 losses within small districts reach tens of thousands, and in one a 

 thousand people caught the disease and perished. f 



* Coleridge. The Nineteenth Century Defenders of Vivisection, p. 8. 

 f R. M. Smith. Therapeutic Gazette, Xovember, 1S84; and George Fleming*. Vivisec- 

 tion and Diseases of Animals. Nineteenth Century, 1882, p. 4Y0. 



