t 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 y