of running serious risks, and actually making himself very
uncomfortable. But he did not begin with himself. His first
experiment was on two hospital patients. On receiving a message
from the hospital to the effect that these two martyrs to
therapeutic science had all but expired in convulsions, he
experimented on a rabbit, which instantly dropped dead. It was
then, and not until then, that he began to experiment on himself,
with the germicide modified in the direction indicated by the
experiments made on the two patients and the rabbit. As a good
many people countenance vivisection because they fear that if the
experiments are not made on rabbits they will be made on
themselves, it is worth noting that in this case, where both
rabbits and men were equally available, the men, being, of
course, enormously more instructive, and costing nothing, were
experimented on first. Once grant the ethics of the
vivisectionists and you not only sanction the experiment on the
human subject, but make it the first duty of the vivisector. If a
guinea pig may be sacrificed for the sake of the very little that
can be learnt from it, shall not a man be sacrificed for the sake
of the great deal that can be learnt from him? At all events, he
is sacrificed, as this typical case shows. I may add (not that it
touches the argument) that the doctor, the patients, and the
rabbit all suffered in vain, as far as the hoped-for rescue of
the race from pulmonary consumption is concerned.


"THE LIE IS A EUROPEAN POWER"

Now at the very time when the lectures describing these
experiments were being circulated in print and discussed eagerly