may be asked, do not I, as a public-spirited man, employ
incendiaries to set it on fire, with a heroic disregard of the
consequences to myself and others? Any vivisector would, if he
had the courage of his opinions. The reasonable answer is that
London can be made healthy without burning her down; and that as
we have not enough civic virtue to make her healthy in a humane
and economical way, we should not have enough to rebuild her in
that way. In the old Hebrew legend, God lost patience with the
world as Nero did with Rome, and drowned everybody except a
single family. But the result was that the progeny of that family
reproduced all the vices of their predecessors so exactly that
the misery caused by the flood might just as well have been
spared: things went on just as they did before. In the same way,
the lists of diseases which vivisection claims to have cured is
long; but the returns of the Registrar-General show that people
still persist in dying of them as if vivisection had never been
heard of. Any fool can burn down a city or cut an animal open;
and an exceptionally foolish fool is quite likely to promise
enormous benefits to the race as the result of such activities.
But when the constructive, benevolent part of the business comes
to be done, the same want of imagination, the same stupidity and
cruelty, the same laziness and want of perseverance that
prevented Nero or the vivisector from devising or pushing through
humane methods, prevents him from bringing order out of the chaos
and happiness out of the misery he has made. At one time it
seemed reasonable enough to declare that it was impossible to
find whether or not there was a stone inside a man's body except
by exploring it with a knife, or to find out what the sun is
made of without visiting it in a balloon. Both these
impossibilities have been achieved, but not by vivisectors. The