(300–306), will see the exceeding importance I attach to the maintenance
of the strict principle of Abolition,—whereby our party renounces all
compromise with the “abominable sin,” and refuses to be again cheated by
the hocus-pocus of Vivisectors and their deceptive anæsthetics. But an
over-estimate (as it seems to me) of the importance of Parliamentary
action, and certainly an under-estimate of that of the great popular
propaganda whereon our hopes must ultimately rest,—a propaganda which
would be paralyzed by the advocacy of half measures,—caused Mr.
Coleridge and his friends to take an opposite view. After a long and, to
me, heart-breaking struggle, I was finally defeated by a vote of 29 to
23, at a Council Meeting on the 9th February, 1898. The policy of Lesser
Measures was adopted by the newly-christened _National Society_; and I
and all the oldest members and founders of the Victoria Street Society
sorrowfully withdrew from what we had proudly, but very mistakenly,
called “our” Society. Amongst us were Mr. Mark Thornhill, Miss Marston,
Mr. and Mrs. Adlam, Lady Mount-Temple, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Morrison, Lady
Paget, Madame Van Eys, and Countess Baldelli. To all workers in the
cause these names will stand as representing the very nucleus of the
whole party since it began its life 23 years ago. The oldest and most
faithful worker of all, Lady Camperdown, who had aided me with the first
memorial in 1874, and who had attended the Committee from first to last,
had risen from her death-bed to write a letter imploring the Chairman
not to support the demand for Lesser Measures. She died before the
decision was reached, and her touching letter, in spite of my
entreaties, was not read to the Congress.
After leaving the old Society with unspeakable pain and mortification I
felt it incumbent on me, while I yet had a little strength left for work
and was not wholly “played out” (as I believe I was supposed to be by
the new spirits at the office) to establish some centre where the only
principle on which the cause can, in my opinion, be safely maintained
should be permanently established, and to which I could transfer the
legacy of £10,000 which then stood in my Will bequeathed unconditionally
to the Committee of the National Society. My first effort was to request
the Committee of the _London Anti-vivisection Society_ to give me such
pledge as it was competent to afford that it would not promote any
measure in Parliament short of Abolition. This pledge being formally
refused, there remained for me no resource but to attempt once more in
my old age to create a new Anti-Vivisection Society; and I resolved to
call it THE BRITISH UNION FOR THE ABOLITION OF VIVISECTION, and to make
it a Federation of Branch Societies, having its centre in Bristol where
my staunch old fellow-workers had had their office for many years
established and in first-rate order. I invited as many friends as seemed
desirous of joining in my undertaking, to a private Conference here at
Hengwrt; and I had the pleasure of receiving and entertaining them for
three days while we quietly arranged the constitution of the new Union
with the invaluable help of our Chairman, Mr. Norris, K.C., late one of
the Justices of the Supreme Court, Calcutta.
The _British Union_ was, in the following month, (June, 1898), formally
constituted at a public conference in Bristol; and it is at present
working vigorously in Bristol and in its various Branches in Wales,
Liverpool, York, Macclesfield, Sheffield, Yarmouth and London. All
information concerning it and its special constitution (whereby the
Branches will all profit by bequests to the Union) may be obtained by
enquiry from either our admirable Hon. Sec., Mrs. Roscoe (Crete Hill,
Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol); our zealous Secretary, Miss Baker, 20,
Triangle, Bristol; or our Hon. Treasurer, John Norris, Esq., K.C.,
Devonshire Club, London.
To those of my readers who may desire to contribute to the
Anti-Vivisection Cause, and who have shared my views on it as set forth
in my numberless pamphlets and letters, and to those specially who, like
myself, intend to bequeath money to carry on the war against Scientific
Cruelty, I now earnestly say as my final Counsel: SUPPORT THE BRITISH
UNION!
CHAPTER
XXI.
_MY HOME IN WALES._
[Illustration:
_Hengwrt._
]
In April, 1884, my friend and I quitted London, having permanently let
our house in South Kensington to Mrs. Kemble. The strain of London life
had become too great for me, and advancing years and narrowed income
together counselled retreat in good time. I continued then and ever
since, of course, to work for the Anti-vivisection cause; but I resigned
my Honorary Secretaryship, June 26th, 1884, and left the entire charge
of the office and of editing the _Zoophilist_ to Mr. Bryan.[35]
A few months later I was disturbed to hear that the Hon. Stephen
Coleridge (Lord Coleridge’s second son) who had always been particularly
kind and considerate towards me, had started a fund to form a farewell
testimonial to me from my fellow-workers. Mr. Coleridge addressed our
leading members and friends in the following letter:—
“12, Ovington Gardens, S.W.,
“August, 1884.
“Sir or Madam,
“At the general meeting of the Victoria Street and International
Societies for the Total Abolition of Vivisection, on the 26th June,
Miss Frances Power Cobbe, for reasons set forth in the annual report,
gave in her resignation of the post of Honorary Secretary, and it was
accepted with deep reluctance.
“The executive committee, meeting shortly afterwards unanimously
passed a resolution to the effect that the occasion ought not to be
passed over by the Society unrecognised, and a list of subscribers to
a testimonial for Miss Cobbe has been opened. The object of this
letter is to acquaint you of these facts and to afford you the
opportunity of adding your name to the list should you desire to do
so.
“Year after year from the foundation of the Societies and before, Miss
Cobbe has fought against the practice of the torture of animals with
constant earnestness, conspicuous power, and enthusiasm born of a
noble cause.
“That testimonials are too plentiful it may perhaps be urged with
truth; but many of us who deprecate the practice of Vivisection feel
that such a life as this, of honour and devotion, were it to stand
unrecognised and unacknowledged, would mark us as entirely ungrateful.
“I remain,
“Your faithful servant,
“STEPHEN COLERIDGE.”
(Honorary Secretary and Treasurer to the fund.)
In a short space of time, I was told, a thousand pounds was collected;
and it was kindly and thoughtfully expended in buying me an annuity of
£100 a year. The amount of labour and trouble which all these
arrangements must have cost Mr. Stephen Coleridge must have been very
great indeed, and only most genuine kindness of heart and regard for me
could have induced him to undertake them. I was very much startled when
I heard of this gift and very unwilling to accept it, as in some degree
taking away the pleasurable sense I had had of working all along
gratuitously for the poor beasts, and of having sacrificed for some
years nearly all my literary earnings to devote myself to their cause.
My objections were over-ruled by friendly insistence, and Lord
Shaftesbury presented the Testimonial to me in the following letter:—
“24, Grosvenor Square, W.,
“February 26th, 1885.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“The Committee of the Anti-vivisection Society, and other
contributors, have assigned to me the agreeable duty of requesting you
to do them the kindness and the honour, to accept the accompanying
Testimonial.
“It expresses, I can assure you, their deep and real sense of the vast
services you have rendered to the world, by the devotion of your time,
your talents and indefatigable zeal, to the assertion of principles
which, though primarily brought into action for the benefit and
protection of the inferior orders of the Creation, are of paramount
importance to the honour and security of the whole Human Race.
“We heartily pray that you may enjoy all health and happiness in your
retirement, which, we trust, will be but temporary. We shall
frequently ask the aid of your counsels and live in hope of your
speedy return to active exertion, in the career in which you have
laboured so vigorously, and which you so sincerely love.
“Believe me to be,
“Very truly yours,
“SHAFTESBURY.”
I acknowledged Lord Shaftesbury’s letter as follows:—
“Hengwrt, Dolgelly, N. Wales,
“February 27th.
“Dear Lord Shaftesbury,
“I find it very difficult to express to you the feelings with which I
have just read your letter, and received the noble gift which
accompanied it. You and all the good friends and fellow-workers who
have thus done me honour and kindness will have added much to the
material comfort and enjoyment of such years as may remain to me; but
you have done still more for me, by filling my heart with the happy
sense of being cared for.
“That you should estimate such work as I have been able to do so
highly as your letter expresses, while it far surpasses anything I can
myself think I have accomplished, yet makes me very proud and very
thankful to God.
“Whatever has been done by me in the way of raising up opposition to
scientific cruelty has been attained only because I had the
inestimable advantage of being supported and guided by you from first
to last, and aided step by step by the unwearied sympathy and
co-operation of my dear and generous fellow-labourers.
“These words are very inadequate to convey my thanks to you for this
gift and all your past goodness towards me, and those which I would
fain offer through you to the Committee and all the Subscribers to
this splendid Testimonial; especially to the Hon. Secretary, who has
undertaken the great trouble which the collection of it must have
involved. I can but repeat, I thank you and them with my whole heart.
“Most sincerely, dear Lord Shaftesbury, and
“Gratefully yours,
“FRANCES POWER COBBE.”
This addition to my little income made up for certain losses which I had
incurred, and raised it to about its original moderate level, enabling
me to share the expenses of our Welsh cottage. I was, however, of
course, a poor woman, and not in a position to help my friend to live
(as we both earnestly desired to do) in her larger house in Hengwrt. We
made an effort to arrange it so, loving the place and enjoying the
beauty of the woods and gardens exceedingly. But we knew it could not be
our permanent home; and a suitable tenant having come on the field,
offering to take it for a term of years which would naturally reach
beyond our lives, we felt that the end of our possession was drawing
near. I was very sorrowful for my own sake, and still more for that of
my friend who had always had peculiar attachment to the place. I
reflected painfully that if I had been only a little better off, she
might not have been obliged to relinquish her proper home.
All this was occupying me much. It was a Thursday morning, and the
gentleman who proposed to become the tenant of Hengwrt was to come on
Monday to make a definite offer which,—once accepted,—would have been
held to bind my friend.
I went downstairs into the old oak hall in the morning and opened the
post-bag. Among the large packet of letters which usually awaits me
there was one from a solicitor in Liverpool. I knew that my kind old
friend Mrs. Yates had died the week before, and I had been informed that
she had left me her residuary legatee; but I imagined her to be in
narrow circumstances, and that a few hundreds would be the uttermost of
my possible inheritance; not sufficient, at all events, to affect
appreciably my available income. I opened the Solicitor’s letter very
coolly and found myself to be,—so far as all my wants and wishes
extend,—a rich woman.
The story of this legacy is a very touching one. I never saw or heard of
Mrs. Yates till a few years before her death, and when she was already
very aged. She began by sending large and generous donations of £50, and
£80, at a time to our Society. Later, she came up from Liverpool to
London when I was managing affairs without a Secretary, and, finding me
at the office, she gave me a still larger donation, actually in
bank-notes. She was an Unitarian, or rather a Theist, like myself; and
having taken very warm interest in my books, she seemed to be drawn to
me by a double sympathy, both on account of religious sympathies, and
those we shared on behalf of the vivisected animals. Of course I
explained to her the details of my work, and she took the warmest
interest in it. After I resigned my office of Honorary Secretary, she
seemed to prefer to give her principal contributions personally to me to
expend for the cause according to my judgment, and twice she sent me
large sums, with strictest injunction to keep her name, and even the
locality of the donor, secret. I called these gifts my _Trust Fund_, and
made grants from it to working allies all over the world. I also spent a
great deal of it in printing large quantities of papers. Of course I
began by sending her a balance sheet of my expenditure; but this she
forbade me to repeat, so I could only from time to time write her long
letters (copied for me by my friend as my writing taxed her sight),
telling her all we were doing. At last she came to see us here in answer
to our repeated invitations, but could not be persuaded to stop more
than one night. Talking to me out walking, she asked me: “Would I take
charge of some money she wished to leave for protection of animals _in
Liverpool_?” I answered that I could not engage to do this, and begged
her to entrust it (as she eventually did) to some friend resident in the
place. Then she said shyly: “Well, you do not object to my leaving you
something for yourself—to my making you my residuary legatee?” adding to
the question some words of affection. Of course I could only press her
hand and say I was grateful for her kind thought. She did it all so
simply, that, being prepossessed with the idea that she was in rather
narrow circumstances, and that she had already given me the savings of
her lifetime in the Trust Fund, it never even occurred to me that this
residuary legateeship could be an important matter, after she had
provided (as she was sure to do) for all legitimate claims upon her.
Nothing could exceed my astonishment when I found how large was the sum
bequeathed in this unpretending way. My friend thought I must be ill
from the difficulty I seem to have found in commanding my voice to tell
her the strange news when she came into the hall, a quarter of an hour
after I had read that epoch-making letter!
Certainly never was a great gift made with such perfect delicacy. Mrs.
Yates had taken care that I should have no reason, so long as she lived,
to suppose myself under any personal obligation to her. Since then, it
may be believed that my heart has never ceased to cherish her memory
with tender gratitude, and to associate the thought of her with all the
comforts of the home which her wealth has secured for me.
Mrs. Yates, at the time I knew her, had been for thirty or forty years
the widow of Mr. Richard Vaughan Yates, a Liverpool Merchant. The
following obituary notice of her appeared in the _Zoophilist_, November
2nd, 1891. I may add that beside her personal legacy to me (given simply
by her will to “her friend Miss Frances Power Cobbe,” without comment of
any kind) Mrs. Yates gave £1,000 to the Victoria Street Society, as well
as £1,000 to the Liverpool Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals;
both bequests being over and above legacies to her executors, relatives
and dependents:—
“OBITUARY.
“THE LATE MRS. YATES.
“The Victoria Street Society and the cause of Anti-vivisection have
lost their most generous supporter in Mrs. Richard Yates, of
Liverpool; a good and noble woman if ever there were one. Born in
humble circumstances, she was one of the truest gentlewomen who ever
lived. Her wide cultivation of mind, broadly liberal but deeply
religious spirit and sound, clear judgment, remained conspicuous even
in extreme old age. The hearts of those whom she aided in their toil
for the poor brutes, with a generosity only equalled by the delicacy
of its manifestations, will ever keep her memory in tender and
grateful respect.”
A warmly-feeling article in the _Inquirer_, October 10th, 1891, known to
be by her friend and pastor, Rev. Valentine Davies, gave the following
sketch of her life. It is due to her whose generosity has so brightened
my later years, that my autobiography should contain some such record of
her goodness and usefulness.
“MRS. RICHARD VAUGHAN YATES.
“On Thursday evening, October 1st, there passed peacefully away one
who was the last of her generation; bearing a name honoured in
Liverpool since the Rev. John Yates, in the latter part of last
century and the early years of this, ministered in Paradise Street
Chapel, and his sons took their places in the first rank of the
merchants and philanthropic citizens of the town. Anne Simpson was
born November 10th, 1805, and to the last retained happy recollections
of her childhood’s home, a simple cottage in the pleasant Cheshire
country. She married, in the midsummer of 1832, Mr. Richard Vaughan
Yates, having first spent a year (for purposes of education) in the
household of Dr. Lant Carpenter, at Bristol, of whom she always spoke
with great veneration. Richly endowed with natural grace and delicacy
of feeling, true nobility of heart, and great simplicity, sustained by
earnest religious feeling and a strong sense of duty, there was never
happier choice than this, which gave to Mrs. Yates the larger
opportunities of wealth and freedom in society. She shared her
husband’s interest in many philanthropic labours, his care for the
Harrington Schools, founded by his father, and for the Liverpool
Institute, his pleasure and his anxieties in the making of the
Prince’s Park, opened in 1849, as his gift to the town. She shared
also to the full his delight in works of art and in foreign travel.
The late Rev. Charles Wicksteed published some charming reminiscences
of one of their Italian journeys; and still more notable was that
journey through Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine, recorded by Miss Harriet
Martineau in her _Eastern Travel_.
“Since her husband’s death, in 1856, Mrs. Yates has stood bravely
alone, living very quietly, but keenly alive to all the interests of
the world, with ardent sympathy for every righteous cause, and
generous help ever ready for public needs as for private charity. No
one will ever know the full measure of her acts of kindness, her care
for the least defended, her many quiet ways of doing good. She was a
great lover of dumb creatures, and felt a passionate indignation at
every kind of cruelty. Four-footed waifs and strays often found a
pleasant refuge in her house, and for many years she was an active
worker for the local branch of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals. The cabmen and donkey-boys of Liverpool at their
annual suppers have long been familiar with her kindly face and
gracious word, and many a time has her intrepid protest checked an act
of cruelty in the public streets. The friend of Frances Power Cobbe,
she took a deep and painful interest in the work of the Victoria
Street Society for the Suppression of Vivisection, and sustained its
work through many years by generous gifts. Herself a solitary woman in
these later years, it was to the solitary and defenceless that her
sympathies most quickly went. She desired for women larger powers to
defend their own helplessness, to share in government for the
amelioration of society, and to share also in the world’s work. She
had a surprising energy and persistence of will in attending to her
own affairs and doing the unselfish work she had most at heart. With a
plain tenacity to the duty that was clear, she went out to the last,
whenever it was possible, to vote at every election where she had a
vote to give, and to attend meetings of a political and useful social
character. Hers was a life of great unselfishness and true humility.
Suffering most of all through sympathy with others, she longed for
more light to dissipate the darker shadows of the world. And she
herself, wherever it was possible to her patient faithfulness and
generous kindness, drove away the darkness, praying thus the best of
prayers, and making light and gladness in innumerable hearts.
“After only a few days of illness she fell asleep. A memorial service
was held on Sunday last in the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth, where for
many years she regularly worshipped. The Rev. V. D. Davis preached the
sermon, and also on the following day, at the Birkenhead Flaybrick
Hill Cemetery, spoke the words of faith at her grave.”—_Inquirer_,
October 10th.
I have erected over her last resting-place (as I learned that she
disliked heavy horizontal tombstones), a large upright slab of polished
red Aberdeen granite. After her name and the dates of her birth and
death, Shakespeare’s singularly appropriate line is inscribed on the
stone:—
“SWEET MERCY IS NOBILITY’S TRUE BADGE.”
On receiving that eventful Thursday morning the news of the unlooked-for
riches which had fallen to my lot, our first act was naturally to
telegraph to the would-be tenant that “another offer” (to wit mine!)
“had been accepted for Hengwrt.” The miseries of house-letting and
home-leaving were over for us, we trust, so long as our lives may last.
There is not much more to be told in this last chapter of my story. The
expansion of life in many directions which wealth brings with it, is as
easy and pleasant as the contraction of it by poverty is the reverse.
Yet I have not altered the opinion I formed long ago when I became poor
after my father’s death, that the importance we commonly attach to
pecuniary conditions is somewhat exaggerated, (so long as a competence
is left) and that other things,—for example, the possession of good
walking powers, or of strong eyesight or of good hearing, not to speak
of the still more precious things of the affections and spirit,—are
larger elements, by far, in human happiness than that which riches
contributes thereto. Of course I have been very glad of this
unlooked-for wealth in my old age. I have felt, first and before all
things else, the immense satisfaction of being able to help the
Anti-vivisection cause in all parts of the world while I live, and to
provide for some further continuance of such help after I die. And next
to this I have rejoiced that the comfort and repose of our beautiful and
beloved home is secured to my friend and myself.
The friendly reader who has travelled with me through the journey of my
three-score years and ten, from my singularly happy childhood in my old
home at Newbridge to this far bourne on the road, will now, I hope,
leave me with kindly wishes for a peaceful evening, and a
not-too-distant curfew bell; in this dear old house, and with my beloved
friend for companion.