19
Pain, terror, mortal agonies that scare
Thy heart in man, to brutes thou wilt not spare:
Are theirs less sad and real? Pain in man
Bears the high mission of the flail and fan;
In brutes 'tis purely piteous."[1]
There is no sight in all the world, to a thoughtful mind, more suggestive of harrowing reflection, no line of the long "riddle of the painful earth" more confounding to the religious soul, than the sufferings of creatures who have never sinned, and for whom (according to common belief) there will be no compensation for injustice in another life. While human pain has its plausible explanations and its possible beneficent results, animal pain seems (at least to our dim eyes) sheer unmitigated evil. I am at a loss then to concieve on what principle, deserving the name of moral, we are to speak and act as if such evil counted absolutely for nothing, while the aches and pains of men are to be so highly esteemed, that the most wholesale sacrifices must not be spared, if a chance exist of alleviating them. When we remember who are the teachers who talk about the "hecatomb," and what is their view of the relationship of man to the lower animals, we discover (as above remarked) that the only intelligible principle on which they proceed is that very ancient one—le droit du plus fort. As the main work of civilization has been the vindication of the rights of the weak, it is not too much, I think, to insist that the practice of Vivisection, in which this tyranny of strength culminates is a retrograde step in the progress of our race, a backwater in the onward flowing stream of justice and mercy, no less anomalous than it is deplorable and portentous.
- ↑ Poems; Vol. VII. "The Amphitheatre at Pozzuoli"
