Page:Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.djvu/1214

 7. That the evil charged against vivisection consists chiefly in the pain inflicted on the animal.

I maintain, on the contrary, that it consists chiefly in the effect produced on the operator. To use the words of Mr. Freeman, in the article already quoted, "the question is not as to the aggregate amount of suffering inflicted, but as to the moral character of the acts by which the suffering is inflicted." We see this most clearly, when we shift our view from the act itself to its remoter consequences. The hapless animal suffers, dies, "and there an end": but the man whose sympathies have been deadened, and whose selfishness has been fostered, by the contemplation of pain deliberately inflicted, may be the parent of others equally brutalised, and so bequeath a curse to future ages. And even if we limit our view to the present time, who can doubt that the degradation of a soul is a greater evil than the suffering of bodily frame? Even if driven to admit this, the advocates of the practice may still assert—

8. That vivisection has no demoralising effect on the character of the operator.

"Look at our surgeons!" they may exclaim. "Are they a demoralised or a butalised class? Yet you must admit, that in the operations they have to perform, they are perpetually contemplating pain—aye, and pain deliberately inflicted by their own hands." The analogy is not a fair one; since the immediate motive—of saving the life, or diminishing the sufferings, of the person operated on—is a counteracting influence in surgery, to which vivisection, with its shadowy hope of some day relieving the sufferings of some human being yet unborn, has nothing parallel to offer. This, however, is a question to be decided by evidence, not by argument. History furnishes us with