LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
CARLYLE AND TYNDALL.
[To THE ED/TOR OF THE 'SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Permit me to enter in your friendly columns a word of protest against a statement in Professor Tyndall's "Recollec- tions," in the current (January) number of the Fortnightly _Review, p. 28.
Professor Tyndall speaks of Carlyle's opinions on the Negro question, and then goes so far afield as the subject of Pasteurism to enjoy what schoolboys call a " shy " at anti- vivisectionists :—
"Perhaps he saw too vividly and resented too warmly the mistakes sometimes made by philanthropists, whereby their mercies are converted into cruelties. We see at the present moment a philanthropy which would be better named an insanity, acting in violent opposition to the wise and true philanthropists who are aiming at the extinction of rabies among dogs, and of its horrible equivalent, hydrophobia among men. Reason is lost on such people, and instead of reason Carlyle gave them scorn." (Italics mine.)
No one can say exactly what Carlyle would have thought of Pasteur's doings, but I am in a position to affirm that he certainly did not (as Professor Tyndall's sentence would lead most readers to suppose) " scorn " the party of anti- vivisectionists who since his death have opposed Pasteurism. Thomas Carlyle's signature (I still possess it) was affixed to the memorial against vivisection which was presented to the Jermyn Street Society in January, 1875, and which started the agitation in England. When the Victoria Street Society was formed a year later, he was one of its first members, and promised to join the deputation to the Home Office, which pressed for legislation on the subject. Subsequently, he readily accepted the office of Vice-President of the Society, and held it till his death. This, Sir, I submit, is not precisely the way in which a man like Carlyle would express his "scorn "of any body of men or of their opinions.
I should like to add that, in our view, it is not enough to constitute a man a "wise and true philanthropist" (or zoophi- list) to "aim at the extinction of rabies or hydrophobia," if the way in which he carries out that laudable aim involve the deliberate infliction of the terrible disease in its worst horrors on " innumerable " dogs, and the creation among men of a carefully fostered panic which, according to M. Dujardin- Beaumetz's address to the French Academie de Medecine, has directly caused four deaths out of every five attributed to
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