The annual meeting of "The Society for the Protection of
Animals Liable to Vivisection " was held at the private house of the Lord Chief Justice, last Saturday, Lord Shaftesbury in the chair, and was addressed by Lord Shaftesbury, Cardinal Manning, Lord Coleridge himself, and several other speakers, including the able Secretary, who explained the very encourag- ing state of the Society's finances, and of its hold on the public. Resolutions were passed committing the Society, as a whole, to total abolition of vivisection,—which includes rendering even ex- periments conducted honestly under anaesthetics, illegal, as well as all inoculations which result in illness and pain to the animal, even though it be illness and pain which, it is hoped, may protect it against worse illness and sorer pain. We confess that this seems to us going further than any British Legislature will ever feel inclined, or even think it right to go ; and we are sorry to see a Society which is doing such admirable work transgressing the limits of reasonable humanity. The only plausible apology for so extreme a course is Lord Coleridge's, that the Act of 1877, which attempted a compromise, has not achieved at all what was hoped from it, bat has proved perfectly reconcilable with the deliberate repetition of the very worst class of British experiments which the evidence of the Commission brought to light, those of Dr. Rutherford on dogs tortured for about eight hours each with operations on their bile-ducts, conducted while thecreatures were paralysed under curari, so that artificial breath- ing had to be kept up, though the poor dogs were in no degree ren- dered insensible to pain. That is an unanswerable argument for stricter legislation, no doubt, and Lord Coleridge's was a noble speech,—noble in its self-restraint, no less than in its courage,— a speech certain to impress deeply all who read it; but none the less we think the Society would do well expressly to exempt experiments in inoculation, and experiments under genuine anaesthesia, from the scope of their Bill.
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