CHIEF JUSTICE OF ENGLAND
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL
ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY
[Picture: Lord Coleridge, Chief Justice of England]
I hope that my inclusion of my father in these articles on the first
supporters of the anti-vivisection movement will not be thought
unbecoming. I see no reason why I should not testify in these pages to
the unswerving adhesion he brought to the cause of humaneness both
towards men and women as well as towards animals, and the wise counsel he
afforded to the pioneers of the fight against vivisection.
It is perhaps now long forgotten that he initiated, drafted and carried
through the House of Commons when he sat in that assembly as member for
Exeter a Bill emancipating married women from the cruel conditions of
servitude whereby their own earnings could legally be taken from them by
their husbands.
This was the first of a series of wide-minded Acts of Parliament which
established the position of women as no longer the mere chattels of their
male relatives.
Cruelty to animals of any kind roused in him a deep and abiding anger: he
never allowed a bearing rein to be inflicted upon his horses either in
London or the country, nor was there ever a tied-up dog in his stables.
Lord Coleridge assisted in the efforts to get the Anti-Vivisection Bill
of 1876 passed without the wrecking amendments that were at the last
minute added to it; after the Bill was passed in its mutilated state Miss
Cobbe with a not unnatural impatience wrote to him and others saying that
"the supporters of vivisection having refused to accept a reasonable
compromise or to permit any line to be drawn between morally justifiable
painless experiments and those which are heinously cruel and involve the
torture of the most sensitive animals" she intended to endeavour to
induce the Society "to condemn the practice altogether as inseparably
bound up with criminal abuses"; and henceforth to adopt "the principle of
uncompromising hostility to vivisection," and she asked him to let her
know whether he would give his support to her proposals. His reply was
what might have been expected from one who could not permit his
irritation at the fate of the Bill to influence his parliamentary
attitude.
I am afraid [he wrote] my answer must be in a sense which you will
think unfavourable. I could not commit myself out of Parliament to
any view which I am not prepared to defend _in_ it. And the
unreasonableness and what I think wrongdoing of the Medical Men would
not justify me as a legislator in voting for what _I_ think wrong
merely in opposition to them or because I could not bring them to
terms which I think just and right.
I do not say that this is at all necessarily the rule for a person
out of Parliament, because so long as you do not agitate for what you
think _wrong_ it is perfectly fair to agitate for more than you
expect to get as a means of getting something of what you think
right. So that I find no fault whatever with any one who takes the
view you take; but my position is somewhat a peculiar one and I must
be cautious to an extent that some people may think coldness and
weakness. I am not afraid of your judgment however.
Six years later, in 1882, he wrote an article in the _Fortnightly Review_
in which he definitely though reluctantly gave his adhesion to total
abolition as the goal to be aimed at, but of course he never at any time
associated himself with the condemnation of all other measures for the
mitigation of the cruelties of the laboratory or of the world at large
that has since been pronounced by the more extreme protagonists on the
anti-vivisection side of the controversy.
This article dealt in a pungent severity with attacks made upon him in
the _Nineteenth Century_ by Sir James Paget, Professor Owen and Dr.
Wilks. As far as I know none of them rejoined. They had had enough!
But the last passage of the article is of a quality that I think my
readers will regard as fully justifying my reproducing it here,--I hope
it will receive their endorsement--the hand that wrote it has long been
still, but thirty-four years have not made one word of it less true or
less beautiful.
There is one authority, conclusive, no doubt, only to those who admit
it, conclusive only to those who believe that they can read it, to
which in conclusion I dare appeal. When a bishop in the Southern
States had been defending slavery, he was asked what he thought our
Lord would have said, what looks He who turned and looked upon St.
Peter would have cast upon a slave-mart in New Orleans, where husband
was torn from wife, child from parent, and beautiful girls, with
scarce a tinge of colour in them, were sold into prostitution. The
answer of the bishop is not known, but I will venture on a kindred
question. What would our Lord have said, what looks would He have
bent, upon a chamber filled with "the unoffending creatures which He
loves," dying under torture deliberately and intentionally inflicted?
or kept alive to endure further torment, in pursuit of knowledge?
Men must answer this question according to their consciences; and for
any man to make himself in such a matter a rule for any other would
be, I know, unspeakable presumption. But to anyone who recognises
the authority of our Lord, and who persuades himself that he sees
which way that authority inclines, the mind of Christ must be the
guide of life. "Shouldest thou not have had compassion upon these,
even as I had pity on thee?" So He seems to me to say, and I shall
act accordingly.