as Julius Caesar remarked nearly 2000 years ago, believes on
the whole, just what it wants to believe. The laboring masses do not
believe the false excuses of the vivisector, because they know that the
vivisector experiments on hospital patients; and the masses belong to
the hospital patient class. The well-to-do people who do not go to
hospitals, and who think they benefit by the experiments made there,
believe the vivisectors' excuses, and angrily abuse and denounce the
anti-vivisectors. The people who "love animals," who keep pets, and
stick pins through butterflies, support the performing dog people, and
are sure that kindness will teach a horse to waltz. And the people who
enjoy a fight will persuade themselves that boxing gloves do not hurt,
and that sparring is an exercise which teaches self-control and
exercises all the muscles in the body more efficiently than any other.

My own view of prizefighting may be gathered from Cashel Byron's
Profession, and from the play written by me more than ten years later,
entitled Mrs. Warren's Profession. As long as society is so organized
that the destitute athlete and the destitute beauty are forced to choose
between underpaid drudgery as industrial producers, and comparative
self-respect, plenty, and popularity as prizefighters and mercenary
brides, licit or illicit, it is idle to affect virtuous indignation at
their expense. The word prostitute should either not be used at all, or
else applied impartially to all persons who do things for money that
they would not do if they had any other assured means of livelihood. The
evil caused by the prostitution of the Press and the Pulpit is so
gigantic that the prostitution of the prize-ring, which at least makes
no serious moral pretensions, is comparatively negligible by comparison.
Let us not forget, however, that the throwing of a hard word such as
prostitution does not help the persons thus vituperated out of their
difficulty. If the soldier and gladiator fight for money, if men and
women marry for money, if the journalist and novelist write for money,
and the parson preaches for money, it must be remembered that it is an
exceedingly difficult and doubtful thing for an individual to set up his
own scruples or fancies (he cannot himself be sure which they are)
against the demand of the community when it says, Do thus and thus, or
starve. It was easy for Ruskin to lay down the rule of dying rather than
doing unjustly; but death