the public, which sees that the average doctor is much too
commonplace and decent a person to be capable of passionate
wickedness of any kind.

Here then, we have in vivisection, as in all the other tolerated
and instituted cruelties, this anti-climax: that only a
negligible percentage of those who practise and consequently
defend it get any satisfaction out of it. As in Mr. Galsworthy's
play Justice the useless and detestable torture of solitary
imprisonment is shown at its worst without the introduction of a
single cruel person into the drama, so it would be possible to
represent all the torments of vivisection dramatically without
introducing a single vivisector who had not felt sick at his
first experience in the laboratory. Not that this can exonerate
any vivisector from suspicion of enjoying his work (or her work:
a good deal of the vivisection in medical schools is done by
women). In every autobiography which records a real experience of
school or prison life, we find that here and there among the
routineers there is to be found the genuine amateur, the
orgiastic flogging schoolmaster or the nagging warder, who has
sought out a cruel profession for the sake of its cruelty. But it
is the genuine routineer who is the bulwark of the practice,
because, though you can excite public fury against a Sade, a
Bluebeard, or a Nero, you cannot rouse any feeling against dull
Mr. Smith doing his duty: that is, doing the usual thing. He is
so obviously no better and no worse than anyone else that it is
difficult to conceive that the things he does are abominable. If
you would see public dislike surging up in a moment against an
individual, you must watch one who does something unusual, no
matter how sensible it may be. The name of Jonas Hanway lives as