his opinions. The reasonable
answer is that London can be made healthy without burning her down; and
that as we have not enough civic virtue to make her healthy in a humane
and economical way, we should not have enough to rebuild her in that
way. In the old Hebrew legend, God lost patience with the world as Nero
did with Rome, and drowned everybody except a single family. But the
result was that the progeny of that family reproduced all the vices of
their predecessors so exactly that the misery caused by the flood might
just as well have been spared: things went on just as they did before.
In the same way, the lists of diseases which vivisection claims to have
cured is long; but the returns of the Registrar-General show that people
still persist in dying of them as if vivisection had never been
heard of. Any fool can burn down a city or cut an animal open; and an
exceptionally foolish fool is quite likely to promise enormous benefits
to the race as the result of such activities. But when the constructive,
benevolent part of the business comes to be done, the same want of
imagination, the same stupidity and cruelty, the same laziness and want
of perseverance that prevented Nero or the vivisector from devising or
pushing through humane methods, prevents him from bringing order out of
the chaos and happiness out of the misery he has made. At one time
it seemed reasonable enough to declare that it was impossible to find
whether or not there was a stone inside a man's body except by exploring
it with a knife, or to find out what the sun is made of without visiting
it in a balloon. Both these impossibilities have been achieved, but not
by vivisectors. The Rontgen rays need not hurt the patient; and
spectrum analysis involves no destruction. After such triumphs of humane
experiment and reasoning, it is useless to assure us that there is no
other key to knowledge except cruelty. When the vivisector offers us
that assurance, we reply simply and contemptuously, "You mean that you
are not clever or humane or energetic enough to find one."

CRUELTY FOR ITS OWN SAKE

It will now, I hope, be clear why the attack on vivisection is not
an attack on the right to knowledge: why, indeed, those who have the
deepest conviction of the sacredness of that right are the leaders of
the attack. No knowledge is finally impossible of human attainment; for
even though it may be beyond our present capacity, the needed capacity
is not unattainable.