approved by the highest legal authorities; torments to the supervision
of which even medical science, in one case at least, lent its
representatives to assist the torturers, and if the facts were not so
well attested, they, too, would pass belief. But we know they are not
fictions; they were actualities. To push them out of recollection
into forgetfulness is to unlearn one of the chief lessons that History
can teach us--the lesson of warning. The atrocities of biological
experimentation can no more be dismissed with a shrug of incredulity
than one can sneer at the agonies of Gerard or Damiens because they,
too, suggest a heartlessness in the men of that time which our finer
civilization can hardly conceive.

But the chief lesson of this black chapter of history concerns the
great question of utility. That these atrocious torments were
inspired simply and solely by an intense passion for revenge is an
immeasurably dishonouring imputation. For the statesmen not only, but
the religious leaders of that period, believed--and justly believed--in
the usefulness of public torture; they believed that the fear of an
ignominious and horrible death amid the jeering cries of the
surrounding populace would tend to hinder others from repeating the
offence. The utility of Terror as a deterrent they knew--as France
knew it in '93, as the Spanish Inquisition knew it for nearly three
centuries, as every nation knew it in times of popular insurrection or
foreign wars. What Civilization came at last to recognize was that
UTILITY OF TORTURE, NO MATTER HOW GREAT, COULD NOT JUSTIFY ITS USE.
This principle in its application to the punishment of human beings
has been universally recognized by every civilized nation in the
world. It only remains for the future Civilization to recognize it so
far as concerns beings inferior to ourselves. The repetition by
students in a laboratory of an experiment upon the nervous system of a
dog, simply to demonstrate well-known facts, tends, perhaps, to fix
them in memory; but that degree of utility does not justify the
torture. "The time will come," said Dr. Bigelow of Harvard Medical
School, "when the world will look back to modern vivisection in the
name of Science as it now does to burning at the stake in the name of
Religion."

CHAPTER VII

THE COMMENCEMENT OF AGITATION

The student of history, attempting to trace the agitation for reform
of vivisect