and honest and reasonable men, led by the strongest contemporary minds, have repudiated it and exposed its crude rascality.  From Shakespear and Dr. Johnson to Ruskin and Mark Twain, the natural abhorrence of sane mankind for the vivisector’s cruelty, and the contempt of able thinkers for his imbecile casuistry, have been expressed by the most popular spokesmen of humanity.  If the medical profession were to outdo the Anti-Vivisection Societies in a general professional protest against the practice and principles of the vivisectors, every doctor in the kingdom would gain substantially by the immense relief and reconciliation which would follow such a reassurance of the humanity of the doctor.  Not one doctor in a thousand is a vivisector, or has any interest in vivisection, either pecuniary or intellectual, or would treat his dog cruelly or allow anyone else to do it.  It is true that the doctor complies with the professional fashion of defending vivisection, and assuring you that people like Shakespear and Dr. Johnson and Ruskin and Mark Twain are ignorant sentimentalists, just as he complies with any other silly fashion:  the mystery is, how it became the fashion in spite of its being so injurious to those who follow it.  Making all possible allowance for the effect of the brazen lying of the few men who bring a rush of despairing patients to their doors by professing in letters to the newspapers to have learnt from vivisection how to cure certain diseases, and the assurances of the sayers of smooth things that the practice is quite painless under the law, it is still difficult to find any civilized motive for an attitude by which the medical profession has everything to lose and nothing to gain.

THE PRIMITIVE SAVAGE MOTIVE

I say civilized motive advisedly; for primitive tribal motives are easy enough to find.  Every savage chief who is not a Mahomet learns that if he wishes to strike the imagination of his tribe—­ and without doing that he can rule them—­he must terrify or revolt them from time to time by acts of hideous cruelty or disgusting unnaturalness.  We are far from being as superior to such tribes as we imagine.  It is very doubtful indeed whether Peter the Great could have effected the changes he made in Russia if he had not fascinated and intimidated his people by his monstrous cruelties and grotesque escapades.  Had he been a nineteenth-century king of England, he would have had to wait for some huge accidental calamity:  a cholera epidemic, a war, or an insurrection, before waking us up sufficiently to get anything done.  Vivisection helps the doctor to rule us as Peter ruled the Russians.  The notion that the man who does dreadful things is superhuman, and that therefore he can also do wonderful things either as ruler, avenger, healer, or what not, is by no means confined to barbarians.  Just as the manifold wickednesses and stupidities of our criminal code are supported, not by any general comprehension