he
United States at the hands of persons who have become deluded into
insensibiity to human suffering?"[1]

[1] Editorial in New York Times, January 28, 1913.

Now, this editorial utterance is not exceptionally misleading. In
scores of newspapers throughout the United States just as ignorant and
as prejudiced statements find editorial expression every year. It
aims to justify the closing of the laboratory to all investigations
whatever, and it attempts to do this by misstatements regarding
historical facts. It tells us of an "outcry raised against the
English doctors in the early seventies," forgetting to mention the
attacks made by the British Medical Journal, the Lancet, and other
medical periodicals, against the terrible cruelties of the practice
long before the "early seventies." The Royal Commission of 1875, we
are told, "found no material abuse." What is meant by the qualifying
adjective "material"? Let us see how the inquiry impressed an
impartial observer, the Lord Chief Justice of England.

"Is, then, the present law reasonable? It is the result of a most
careful inquiry, conducted by eminent men in 1875, men certainly
neither weak sentimentalists nor ignorant and prejudiced
humanitarians, men among whom are to be found Mr. Huxley and
Mr. Erichsen, Mr. Hutton, and Sir John Karslake. There men
unanimously recommended legislation, and legislation, in some
important respects, more stringent than Parliament thought fit to
pass. They recommend it on a body of evidence at once interesting and
terrible. Interesting, indeed, it is from the frank apathy to the
suffering of animals, however awful, avowed by some of the witnesses;
for the noble humanity of some few; for the curious ingenuity with
which others avoided the direct and verbal approval of horrbile
cruelties which yet they refused to condemn.... Terrbile the evidence
is for the details of torture, of mutilation, of life slowly destroyed
in torment, or skilfully prolonged for the infliction of the same or
diversified agonies, for days, for months, in some cases for more than
a year."[1]

[1] Fortnightly Review, February, 1882.

This was the view of the Lord Chief Justice of England of that day;
and yet the unknown scribe, writing in a New York newspaper, without
adducing a particle of evidence, would have his readers to believe
that the Commission of 1875 "FOUND NO MATERIAL ABUSE."

Equally unfair and inaccurate is the editorial reference to the re