ch sees that the average doctor is much too commonplace and
decent a person to be capable of passionate wickedness of any kind.

Here then, we have in vivisection, as in all the other tolerated
and instituted cruelties, this anti-climax: that only a negligible
percentage of those who practise and consequently defend it get any
satisfaction out of it. As in Mr. Galsworthy's play Justice the useless
and detestable torture of solitary imprisonment is shown at its worst
without the introduction of a single cruel person into the drama, so
it would be possible to represent all the torments of vivisection
dramatically without introducing a single vivisector who had not felt
sick at his first experience in the laboratory. Not that this can
exonerate any vivisector from suspicion of enjoying his work (or her
work: a good deal of the vivisection in medical schools is done by
women). In every autobiography which records a real experience of school
or prison life, we find that here and there among the routineers there
is to be found the genuine amateur, the orgiastic flogging schoolmaster
or the nagging warder, who has sought out a cruel profession for the
sake of its cruelty. But it is the genuine routineer who is the bulwark
of the practice, because, though you can excite public fury against a
Sade, a Bluebeard, or a Nero, you cannot rouse any feeling against
dull Mr. Smith doing his duty: that is, doing the usual thing. He is so
obviously no better and no worse than anyone else that it is difficult
to conceive that the things he does are abominable. If you would see
public dislike surging up in a moment against an individual, you must
watch one who does something unusual, no matter how sensible it may be.
The name of Jonas Hanway lives as that of a brave man because he was the
first who dared to appear in the streets of this rainy island with an
umbrella.

THE OLD LINE BETWEEN MAN AND BEAST

But there is still a distinction to be clung to by those who dare not
tell themselves the truth about the medical profession because they are
so helplessly dependent on it when death threatens the household. That
distinction is the line that separates the brute from the man in the old
classification. Granted, they will plead, that we are all cruel; yet the
tame-stag-hunter does not hunt men; and the sportsman who lets a leash
of greyhounds loose on a hare would be horrified at the thought of
letting them loose on a human child. The l