with money to spend, and as in many instances it has achieved
this object, therefore the burglar is a public benefactor and the
police are ignorant sentimentalists. No highway robber has yet
harrowed us with denunciations of the puling moralist who allows
his child to suffer all the evils of poverty because certain
faddists think it dishonest to garotte an alderman. Thieves and
assassins understand quite well that there are paths of
acquisition, even of the best things, that are barred to all men
of honor. Again, has the silliest burglar ever pretended that to
put a stop to burglary is to put a stop to industry? All the
vivisections that have been performed since the world began have
produced nothing so important as the innocent and honorable
discovery of radiography; and one of the reasons why radiography
was not discovered sooner was that the men whose business it was
to discover new clinical methods were coarsening and stupefying
themselves with the sensual villanies and cutthroat's casuistries
of vivisection. The law of the conservation of energy holds good
in physiology as in other things: every vivisector is a deserter
from the army of honorable investigators. But the vivisector does
not see this. He not only calls his methods scientific: he
contends that there are no other scientific methods. When you
express your natural loathing for his cruelty and your natural
contempt for his stupidity, he imagines that you are attacking
science. Yet he has no inkling of the method and temper of
science. The point at issue being plainly whether he is a rascal
or not, he not only insists that the real point is whether some
hotheaded antivivisectionist is a liar (which he proves by
ridiculously unscientific assumptions as to the degree of
accuracy attainable in human statement), but never dreams of
offering any scientific evidence by his own methods.