At the meeting at St. James's Hall on Thursday, Bishop
Barry made a very good speech, frankly regretting the grave errors into whieh he had been led. The Anti-Vivisectionists, amongst whom we are proud to reckon ourselves, are bound, we think, to give their opponents credit for wishing to avoid the infliction of pain wherever they themselves do not speak in Dr. Klein's heartless fashion on the subject. But the Vivisectors must never forget that, however reluctant they may be to inflict pain, they themselves emphatically insist and maintain that, for an adequate purpose, they may inflict even torture. We have never met with a single great medical authority who would assert that there was any ade- quate result from the anguish inflicted by Professor Ruther- ford on thirty-six dogs, whose livers he opened, and treated for eight hours with various injections, simply to ascertain the effect of different drugs on the secretion of bile, and all without administering any aimsthetic,—for the wish to believe curare an anEesthetic is almost certainly the father to the thought that is one, which no less an authority than Claude Ber- nard utterly denied. Nevertheless, we never yet met with any medical authority who would condemn that series of most painful experiments by one of their fellow-workers. Even the late Dr. Carpenter, one of the most humane of men in every relation of life, went so far as to assert before the Commission (questions 5,604-5,615) that there was no moral limit to the anguish which ought to be inflicted by a competent physiolo- gist, if a great physiological discovery might properly be anticipated from the infliction of that agony. That is the principle against which we protest with all our might, and it is against that principle, as we believe, that the Victoria Street Society wages just and, we hope, internecine war. It seems to us far more menacing to the moral nature of man than auspicious for his scientific nature.
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