ROUTINE

Yet most vivisectors would probably come triumphant out of such a series

of experiments, because vivisection is now a routine, like butchering

or hanging or flogging; and many of the men who practise it do so only

because it has been established as part of the profession they have

adopted. Far from enjoying it, they have simply overcome their natural

repugnance and become indifferent to it, as men inevitably become

indifferent to anything they do often enough. It is this dangerous power

of custom that makes it so difficult to convince the common sense of

mankind that any established commercial or professional practice has its

root in passion. Let a routine once spring from passion, and you will

presently find thousands of routineers following it passionlessly for

a livelihood. Thus it always seems strained to speak of the religious

convictions of a clergyman, because nine out of ten clergymen have no

religions convictions: they are ordinary officials carrying on a routine

of baptizing, marrying, and churching; praying, reciting, and preaching;

and, like solicitors or doctors, getting away from their duties with

relief to hunt, to garden, to keep bees, to go into society, and the

like. In the same way many people do cruel and vile things without being

in the least cruel or vile, because the routine to which they have been

brought up is superstitiously cruel and vile. To say that every man

who beats his children and every schoolmaster who flogs a pupil is a

conscious debauchee is absurd: thousands of dull, conscientious people

beat their children conscientiously, because they were beaten themselves

and think children ought to be beaten. The ill-tempered vulgarity that

instinctively strikes at and hurts a thing that annoys it (and all

children are annoying), and the simple stupidity that requires from a

child perfection beyond the reach of the wisest and best adults (perfect

truthfulness coupled with perfect obedience is quite a common condition

of leaving a child unwhipped), produce a good deal of flagellation among

people who not only do not lust after it, but who hit the harder because

they are angry at having to perform an uncomfortable duty. These people

will beat merely to assert their authority, or to carry out what they

conceive to be a divine order on the strength of the precept of Solomon

recorded in the Bible, which carefully adds that Solomon completely

spoilt his own son and turned away from the god of his fathers to the

sensuous idolatry in which he ended his days.

In the same way we find men and women practising vivisection as

senselessly as a humane butcher, who adores his fox terrier, will cut

a calf's throat and hang it up by its heels to bleed slowly to death

because it is the custom to eat veal and insist on its being white; or

as a German purveyor nails a goose to a board and stuffs it with food

because fashionable people eat pate de foie gras; or as the crew of

a whaler breaks in on a colony of seals and clubs them to death in

wholesale massacre because ladies want sealskin jackets; or as fanciers

blind singing birds with hot needles, and mutilate the ears and tails

of dogs and horses. Let cruelty or kindness or anything else once become

customary and it will be practised by people to whom it is not at all

natural, but whose rule of life is simply to do only what everybody else

does, and who would lose their employment and starve if they indulged

in any peculiarity. A respectable man will lie daily, in speech and in

print, about the qualities of the article he lives by selling, because

it is customary to do so. He will flog his boy for telling a lie,

because it is customary to do so. He will also flog him for not telling

a lie if the boy tells inconvenient or disrespectful truths, because

it is customary to do so. He will give the same boy a present on his

birthday, and buy him a spade and bucket at the seaside, because it is

customary to do so, being all the time neither particularly mendacious,

nor particularly cruel, nor particularly generous, but simply incapable

of ethical judgment or independent action.

Just so do we find a crowd of petty vivisectionists daily committing

atrocities and stupidities, because it is the custom to do so.

Vivisection is customary as part of the routine of preparing lectures in

medical schools. For instance, there are two ways of making the action

of the heart visible to students. One, a barbarous, ignorant, and

thoughtless way, is to stick little flags into a rabbit's heart and

let the students see the flags jump. The other, an elegant, ingenious,

well-informed, and instructive way, is to put a sphygmograph on the

student's wrist and let him see a record of his heart's action traced

by a needle on a slip of smoked paper. But it has become the custom for

lecturers to teach from the rabbit; and the lecturers are not original

enough to get out of their groove. Then there are the demonstrations

which are made by cutting up frogs with scissors. The most humane man,

however repugnant the operation may be to him at first, cannot do it

at lecture after lecture for months without finally--and that very

soon--feeling no more for the frog than if he were cutting up pieces of

paper. Such clumsy and lazy ways of teaching are based on the cheapness

of frogs and rabbits. If machines were as cheap as frogs, engineers

would not only be taught the anatomy of machines and the functions of

their parts: they would also have machines misused and wrecked before

them so that they might learn as much as possible by using their eyes,

and as little as possible by using their brains and imaginations. Thus

we have, as part of the routine of teaching, a routine of vivisection

which soon produces complete indifference to it on the part even of

those who are naturally humane. If they pass on from the routine of

lecture preparation, not into general practice, but into research work,

they carry this acquired indifference with them into the laboratory,

where any atrocity is possible, because all atrocities satisfy

curiosity. The routine man is in the majority in his profession always:

consequently the moment his practice is tracked down to its source

in human passion there is a great and quite sincere poohpoohing from

himself, from the mass of the profession, and from the mass of the

public, which sees that the average doctor is much too commonplace and

decent a person to be capable of passionate wickedness of any kind.

Here then, we have in vivisection, as in all the other tolerated

and instituted cruelties, this anti-climax: that only a negligible

percentage of those who practise and consequently defend it get any

satisfaction out of it. As in Mr. Galsworthy's play Justice the useless

and detestable torture of solitary imprisonment is shown at its worst

without the introduction of a single cruel person into the drama, so

it would be possible to represent all the torments of vivisection

dramatically without introducing a single vivisector who had not felt

sick at his first experience in the laboratory. Not that this can

exonerate any vivisector from suspicion of enjoying his work (or her

work: a good deal of the vivisection in medical schools is done by

women). In every autobiography which records a real experience of school

or prison life, we find that here and there among the routineers there

is to be found the genuine amateur, the orgiastic flogging schoolmaster

or the nagging warder, who has sought out a cruel profession for the

sake of its cruelty. But it is the genuine routineer who is the bulwark

of the practice, because, though you can excite public fury against a

Sade, a Bluebeard, or a Nero, you cannot rouse any feeling against

dull Mr. Smith doing his duty: that is, doing the usual thing. He is so

obviously no better and no worse than anyone else that it is difficult

to conceive that the things he does are abominable. If you would see

public dislike surging up in a moment against an individual, you must

watch one who does something unusual, no matter how sensible it may be.

The name of Jonas Hanway lives as that of a brave man because he was the

first who dared to appear in the streets of this rainy island with an

umbrella.