THE MORAL ASPECTS
OF
Vivisection.
The notion of the extreme tenderness and sensibility of early youth, especially in the male human creature, is almost as purely conventional and remote from experience as the poetic fiction of an English spring, all sunshine and flowers, That type of cruelty which comes of ignorance and recklessness, both of their own suffering and that of others, and wherein Curiosity, not Malice, is the prevailing motive, is at its worst in adolescence; and only as years go by, an observations multiply, and the experience of pain ploughs up the heart, does sympathy grow by slow degrees, till at last, as Sir Arthur Helps has pointed out, it may be predicted with certainty that a jury of old men will take the most merciful view of every case brought for their verdict.
On the larger scale of nations and of humanity, the same process of slow initiation into the mysteries of suffering and of sympathy goes forward, and we may now behold society so far emerged from the age of barbarism that an English gentleman would no more insert now-a-days in his account- book (like the pious and charitable Alleyne) an item for
“Whipping of ye Blind Beare,” than the stream of traffic
(3)
