1864.] BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 77 



sure that " want of decency is want of sense " — as Pope had said 

 — as that a want of humanity is a want of culture. Rudeness, 

 ignorance, want of education, were much more surely connected 

 wiih cruelty than was cowardice. All children pretty nearly 

 were cruel — that is to say, they were capable of performing acts 

 which adults, at least of the upper classes, shrink from. Most, if 

 not all, persons in the lower order of society concerned in the 

 capture of animals were pretty nearly invariably cruel ; and, if 

 reproved for cruelty, they would often be unable to understand 

 what was meant. Gamekeepers, again, killed anything which 

 possesses life, unless they knew they could be prosecuted for so 

 doing, or were paid for preserving it. Cruelty, then, usually flowed 

 from want of thought, want of culture, and want of refinement. 

 Was it probable, then, that men of a science demanding much 

 thought, much culture, and not a little education, should resem- 

 ble persons lacking all these things in the very points most directly 

 characteristic of such deficiencies? Let him state, too, great facts 

 ao-ainst which no amount of writing: or of demonstration could be 

 of any avail, except by ignoring them. The facts were — first, ex- 

 periments on hving animals very frequently cause their death 

 instantaneously; secondly, when this is not the case, there was 

 chloroform, which was almost invariably employed. In vivisec- 

 tion, as it was called, frequently the first step was the destruction 

 of life, and that in a way as speedy, to say the least, as by the 

 ordinary methods of destruction at the command of either the 

 sportsman or the butcher. Now, surely a life might as well be 

 sacrificed for increasing knowledge as for the production of flesh- 

 food, or for what was called sport. Experiment, too, was tedious 

 and toilsome, and was, therefore, rarely undertaken out of wan- 

 tonness, or for the gratification of malignity. Undertaken for the 

 ends of science, it had as good a claim to our sympathy as the 

 practices of the " gentle craft " of anglers, to say nothing of those 

 of the destroyers of warm-blooded animals. Vegetarians, it was 

 true, but they alone, could meet this argument on principle. They 

 could say, " Your * Tu quoque ' has no gagging force when used 

 tons: we den v that two blacks make one white. You cannot 

 experiment as you choose — find out how to create life ; and no- 

 thing can justify you in taking it away." He did not see how 

 this could be met, at least on vegetarian principles. But from 

 what he had already seen in Newcastle, he judged that the vege- 



