nspection would probably degenerate into a sham. A
well-known experimentor once said to the rwiter: "Your inspectors of
laboratories must be either well-educated and competent men, or else
officials of the grade of the average policemen. If the belong to the
first class, do you think they will become detectives and spies? If,
on the other hand, they earn the salary of the average policeman, will
they be intelligent enough to discover abuses, and invariably of such
rectitude that a ten-dollar bill will not induce official blindness?"

It would seem that this objection to State inspection cannot be
lightly considered. For the prevention of cruelty it may be right to
permit certain persons always to have the right to enter any
laboratory whatever without previous notice; the fact that they may
come at any time constitutes the safeguard to a limited degree. But
such men must be persons unpaid by the State, of intelligence
sufficient to comprehend all peculiarities of experimentation, and of
a probity that no bribe can disturb. It would be far better to allow
things to go on as they are than to have cruelty protected by public
confidence in a legal supervision that did not sufficiently supervise
and restrian.

It appears to me, as I have said elsewhere, that first of all public
opinion should be aroused, not so much to condemn all experimentation
upon animals, as to know with certainty the facts about it. Of the
vivisection of animals in England and America carried on in secret,
the general public, even of the more intelligent class, has no more
accurate inforumation than two centuries ago it had of the methods of
the Spanish Inquisition in the dungeons of Madrid or Seville. How did
it happen that an institution so execrated and so universally
condemned to-day, managed for centuries almost unchallenged, to exist?
Precisely as the closed laboratory manges to exist among us, becauseof
the secrecy in which it was surrounded, and the general confidence
which it claimed as its due. Reform canot make headway so long as the
dungeon is dark and the laboratory is locked. The strongest line of
defence is the maintenance of ignorance, even though we have the
curious anomaly, existing nowhere else, of Science covering herself
with darkness and hiding behind ignorance. It was one of the ablest
advocates for vivisection that America has produced, who, in an
address before the American Academy of Medicine, condemned the secrecy