so far as their
painlessness is concerned, why fear to make them known? On the other
hand, if animals are subjected to prolonged and extreme torment for the
illustration of well-known and accepted facts; if students not only
witness, but are sometimes required to perform for themselves
experiments as agonizing and as useless as any that ever disgraced the
torture-chambers of Magendie, we can well understand why immunity from
criticism can only be secured by concealment and secrecy. Opposition
to publicity or to investigation by the Government is quite
conceivable, if there be something which must be hidden out of sight.

In the long-run, the policy of concealment must fail, and the whole
truth be known. Then, indeed, we may hope for the beginning of
reform. That fifty or a hundred years hence, all utilization of
animals, whether for food or raiment or scientific ends will have
absolutely ceased in England and America I am not able to believe.
But I am very sure that before this century closes, the subjection of
animals to pain for the demonstration of well-known facts will have
come to an end; that agonizing experiments will have ceased; that
every laboratory wherein animals are ever used for experimental
purposes will be open to inspection "from cellar to garret," as
Professor Bigelow of Harvard Medical School said they should be; and
that except as a shield for crime, the secrecy which now enshrouds the
practice will for ever have disappeared.

We are living to-day in a period of unrest and change, such as the
world has never known before. A new social consciousness has awakened
throughout the civilized world, a feeling that for those who are to
come after us, life should be happier and better than it is. Humanity
is advancing toward its ideals by leaps and bounds, where once it
slowly crept. Every social problem, from the prevention of cruelty,
the suppression of vice, the rescue of the submerged, to the abolition
of poverty itself, is to-day more in the thought of humanity than ever
before in the history of the world. We are but just beginning to
learn our duties to human beings of other races; may we not be assured
that the more sensitive conscience of the future will define with
authority, our duties to the humbler sharers of this mysterious gift
of life? Already, Science has told us, that far in the past, we had
the same origin; and surely, when some higher ideal than utility to
ourselves, shall dominate