cruelty for pleasure or profit or both under the cloak of
science. We are all tarred with the same brush; and the
vivisectors are not slow to remind us of it, and to protest
vehemently against being branded as exceptionally cruel and its
devisors of horrible instruments of torture by people whose main
notion of enjoyment is cruel sport, and whose requirements in the
way of villainously cruel traps occupy pages of the catalogue of
the Army and Navy Stores.


THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION OF CRUELTY

There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even
his passion of pity and makes it savage. Simple disgust at
cruelty is very rare. The people who turn sick and faint and
those who gloat are often alike in the pains they take to witness
executions, floggings, operations or any other exhibitions of
suffering, especially those involving bloodshed, blows, and
laceration. A craze for cruelty can be developed just as a craze
for drink can; and nobody who attempts to ignore cruelty as a
possible factor in the attraction of vivisection and even of
antivivisection, or in the credulity with which we accept its
excuses, can be regarded as a scientific investigator of it.
Those who accuse vivisectors of indulging the well-known passion
of cruelty under the cloak of research are therefore putting
forward a strictly scientific psychological hypothesis, which is
also simple, human, obvious, and probable. It may be as wounding
to the personal vanity of the vivisector as Darwin's Origin of
Species was to the people who could not bear to think that they
were cousins to the monkeys (remember Goldsmith's anger when he