ou
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 o