chief preoccupation became the desire to put
an end to such abominations.

In 1874 Miss Cobbe drew up a memorial to the Council of the Royal Society
for the prevention of cruelty to animals urging upon them "the immediate
adoption of such measures as may approve themselves to their judgment as
most suitable to promote the end in view, namely, the _restriction of
vivisection_." And with indefatigable zeal she collected the signatures
to it of a very large number of the most distinguished men in England;
among them were such names as those of Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson,
Robert Browning, John Morley, John Bright, Leslie Stephen, W. Lecky, B.
Jowett, John Ruskin, Dean Stanley, and Canon Liddon.

In view of the fierce advocacy of vivisection to which the present Lord
Knutsford has committed himself it is interesting to record that his
father Sir Henry Holland's name appears among the signatories of this
memorial.

The Council of the R.S.P.C.A. in 1875 displayed all the familiar
characteristics of the Council of to-day. On receiving this notable
memorial they adopted the device of promising to appoint a sub-committee
to consider the whole question of vivisection. Unlike the sub-committee
appointed in 1907 "to consider the whole question of sport" which never
sat, it seems that this sub-committee on vivisection really did sit once,
after which no more was heard of it.

Mr. Colam the Secretary was sent to call on the leading vivisectors to
ask them about their own proceedings; and the Council appear to have
imagined that, having asked the persons whose conduct was impugned what
they thought about that conduct, their function as representing the
Society entrusted with the protection of animals from cruelty was
fulfilled.

Miss Cobbe, like many of us to-day, really wanted cruelty to animals
stopped, and she was not likely to be satisfied with such a farcical
evasion, so she set to work and started the Victoria Street Society, and
to her above all others therefore belongs the undying fame and glory of
first raising aloft the standard of the imperishable cause for which that
Society exists and strives.

In that memorable year of 1875 the great Society in Jermyn Street,
misrepresented by a collection of somnolent inefficients, turned their
backs on tortured animals and stopped their ears to their cries of agony;
and all the subsequent years are strewn with opportunities abandoned and
duties neglected which one by one