Chapter 5

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.