Page:The moral aspects of vivisection (IA 101694999.nlm.nih.gov).pdf/7

 uniformly courteous towards al] classes; and while, in a very special manner, we are beginning to take a new interest in the intelligence and affections of the lower animals, and to visit their cruel treatment with condign punishment, —in the midst of all this humanizing process we suddenly find a break, a pause, nay, a very decided retrograde movement. It is at least fitting that we should inquire into the meaning of this strange and startling phenomenon. Let us suppose, to aid our imagination, that something analogous to vivisection were going on in some other department of activity, say of Art. There are legends (probably mythical) that dilettante sovereigns in the Cinque Cento age, when Art wag supreme as Science is now, were so anxious to air the great painters at their work, that they beheaded men to serve for models for John the Baptist, and crucified boys to help a Calvary, Were a similar expedient suggested in 1875 in the schools of the Royal Academy, can we conceive the tempest of public indignation which would gather round the lead of the enthusiastic Art-Director who had deemed the end of producing a noble and religious picture so sacred that all means were lawful to attain it? Or suppose that, for the sanitary interests of the community, it were proposed to stamp out small-pox by administering poison to every person seized with the disease. Is it imaginable that such a scheme would obtain a hearing? Or (to come to closer analogies) let us fancy that, in the progress of gastronomy, an experiment, to which we had not become hardened by custom, and no less cruel than the production of foie gras, or the old abandoned process for making white veal, were suddenly to be introduced from France; or that sportsmen adopted a fashion of merely mangling their game, or using red-hot poisoned shot. How horrible and startling should we pronounce the novel indulgence of tastes so