1876.] 
Vivisection. 
327 
enthusiastic supporters. But though they consider them- 
selves on this account far superior to Christians in a moral 
point of view, the life of man is no more respected amongst 
them than it is amongst people who do not evince such 
exaggerated tenderness for the brute creation. We cannot 
refrain from quoting a short and significant discussion be- 
tween a Jain priest and an English missionary; — - 
“ You take life, 5 ’ said the Jain ; “ we take none.” 
“ Oh ! what a happy country yours must be/’ replied the 
missionary : “ you have no wars ” 
“ We have wars,” said the Jain, interrupting. 
“ I thought you said that your people never took life ? ’’ 
returned the missionary. 
“ We take only human life,” said the Jain. 
In faCt, India has, generally speaking, shown that an 
overstrained tenderness for animals may coexist with great 
cruelty to man* Southern Europe, on the contrary, has 
been consistently merciless to both man and beast, and has 
tortured heretics, Moors, Jews, bulls, and horses with the 
utmost impartiality. We see, therefore, that the utmost 
tenderness to brutes may be accompanied with cruelty 
towards men, just as, conversely, a habit of inflicting pain 
upon animals for certain purposes and on especial occasions 
may coexist with kindness to man, and even to the lower 
animals where such purposes are not involved. All this 
may, no doubt, be grossly inconsistent conduCt, but incon- 
sistency is one of the most cherished privileges of human 
nature, and anti-viviseCtionists should be the last to com- 
plain of it. The real germ of cruelty, of which we all ought 
to beware, is the infliction of pain for frivolous, unworthy, 
or impossible ends, and especially the making it a source of 
gratification. From all this there is no one more remote than 
is the viviseCtionist. 
The agitators urge that vivisection is not a trustworthy 
method of interrogating nature. This objection, if well 
founded, would be decisive, since in that case all operations 
undertaken upon living animals would be mere gratuitous 
inflictions of pain, and would then be justly branded as 
cruelty ; but, being unfounded, it is remarkable chiefly for 
its impudence. Might we not, in common charity, suppose 
that the distinguished physiologists of the past and the 
present who have from time to time undertaken experiments 
* The Turks are famed for their humanity to animals. What other nation, 
for instance, would not long ago have made a clean sweep of the loathsome 
dogs which infest the streets of Constantinople and of other large cities of the 
Ottoman Empire ? Yet to man they have been merciless. 
