Chapter VI: John Ruskin

No one who has ever read a line of Ruskin could doubt on which side his mind and heart would be ranged in the controversy over vivisection.

Here was a lord of language who was also one of the great moral teachers of the world. To him the torture of a helpless animal for a scientific purpose was a defiance of religion and an insult to God. Such pursuits he declared "were all carried on in defiance of what had hitherto been held to be compassion and pity, and of the great link which bound together the whole of creation from its Maker to the lowest creature."

[Picture: John Ruskin. From a drawing by Samuel Laurence in the
collection of John Lane]

He occupied the illustrious post of Slade Professor of art at Oxford when convocation voted to endow vivisection in the University and install Dr. Burdon Sanderson, the smotherer of dogs, in a laboratory set up for him.

In vain did Ruskin protest against this horrible educational cancer being grafted on to the happiness, peace, and light of gracious Oxford. Convocation preferred the blight of the coward Science to the cultivation of all that was beautiful, distinguished, humane, and brave; and they reaped as they had sown, they kept the dog smotherer and lost the radiant spirit and uplifting eloquence of the inspired seer. Ruskin resigned and Oxford heard that voice of supreme nobility no more.

The Vice-Chancellor for very shame could not bring himself to read Ruskin's letter of resignation to convocation. The editor of the _University Gazette_ also had the effrontery to leave a letter from Ruskin, giving the reasons for his resignation, unpublished; and the _Pall Mall Gazette_ crowned the edifice of poltroonery by announcing that he had resigned owing to his "advancing years."

Evil communications corrupt good manners, and association with vivisection led these dignitaries and editors to flout and insult a man whose shoe strings they were not worthy to tie. Time is merciful and their very names are forgotten.

Ruskin had, a little time before these events, asked the University for a grant to build a well-lighted room for the undergraduates apart from the obscure and inconvenient Ruskin school; his request was instantly refused on the plea that the University was in debt, yet in the very next year this debt encumbered seat of learning and courtesy voted 10,000 pounds for the erection of a laboratory for the vivisector and 2,000 pounds more towards fitting it up and maintaining it,--for troughs and gags and cages and the rest of the horrible paraphernalia.

This must I should imagine be the most squalid page in the history of modern Oxford.

More than thirty years have passed since that University thus publicly preferred a dog smootherer to one of the noblest of teachers and saintliest of men.

Both are now long departed. The one can no more block up the wind-pipes of living dogs and watch their dying convulsions, and the other can no longer lead the minds of youths and maidens to seek and find beauty in the visible world about them and recognise in it the hand of God--but the world has known which of these men led the youth of Oxford to look up and which to look down, and to-day a merciful oblivion covers the names and doings of this triumphant vivisector and his valiant supporters, while to the farthest inch of the English-speaking realms the writings of Ruskin are treasured in a million homes and his name acclaimed with grateful reverence.

_NOTE_.--This chapter on Ruskin having appeared as an article in _The Animals' Defender and Zoophilist_ in March, 1917, and a copy of it having been sent to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the following correspondence ensued:--

CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD,
_March_ 3_rd_, 1917.

DEAR SIR,--I thank you for sending me the copy of _The Zoophilist_.
May I point out that it is not customary for the Vice-Chancellor to
read to Convocation the letters of Professors who resign, or to print
the letters in the Gazette?

Yours very truly,
T. B. STRONG.

HON. STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

SOUTH WALES CIRCUIT,
ASSIZE COURT, CARDIFF,
_March_ 6_th_, 1917.

DEAR SIR,--I have received your letter of the 3rd of March informing
me that it is not customary for the Vice-Chancellor to read to
Convocation the letters of professors who resign or to print such
letters in the University Gazette, but I do not understand from you
that the Vice-Chancellor is precluded by any rule of Convocation from
reading such a letter, or that the editor if there be one of the
University Gazette is unable by any rule of his office to admit such
a letter to his columns--and I therefore feel that I was quite
entitled to make the comments I did in _The Animals' Defender and
Zoophilist_. When such a man as Ruskin desired the reasons for his
resignation to be made clear, I take leave to think that the breach
of a custom that enabled the University to conceal those reasons and
even permit misapprehensions of those reasons to be given a wide
publicity, would have been better than its observance. And a
University Gazette that refuses to publish the letter of a
world-famous professor of that University, must arrogate to itself a
title to which it can justly make no claim.

Very truly yours,
STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF CHRIST CHURCH, VICE-CHANCELLOR, OXFORD.

At this distance of time it is probable that the present Dean of Christ Church may not fully realise the sort of person Professor Sanderson, whom the University preferred to Ruskin, was: I therefore think he may like to see a letter I wrote at the time to the papers which has fortunately been preserved:

SIR,--I hope you will find room for an answer to the remarkable
letter of Professor Acland in your issue of the 9th, and to
"F.R.S.'s" attack on Miss Cobbe in that of the 10th of March.

Professor Acland says:--

"I have to say to English parents that everyone at home and abroad,
who knows anything of biological science in England, will think them
fortunate if their children being students of medicine, fall under
the elevating influence of Professor Sanderson's scientific and
personal character."

And "F.R.S." says:--

"I was a very constant attendant at Dr. Sanderson's private
laboratory during the last ten years of his professorship at
University College, and during the whole of that time I never
witnessed a single operation involving pain."

Now, are we not justified in estimating Professor Sanderson's
nobility of disposition by his books?

He was joint author and editor of the "Handbook for the Physiological
Laboratory," the publication in which of the tortures of animals
roused a feeling in the country that led to the appointment of the
Royal Commission to inquire into these practices. And is he not now
one of the editors of the _Journal of Physiology_, which continually
details to the world experiments involving terrible torments?

In his "Handbook of Physiology" we find such descriptions as the
following:--

Page 319. "(109).--_Asphyxia by complete Occlusion of the
Trachea_.--For this purpose a cannula must be fixed air-tight in the
trachea, the mouth of which is of such form that it can be plugged
with a cork. . . . The phenomena as they present themselves in the
dog. . . . _First minute_. Excessive respiratory movements in which
at first the expansive efforts of the thoracic muscles, afterwards
the expulsive efforts of the abdominal wall, are most violent.
Towards the close of the first minute the animal becomes convulsed.
_Second minute_. Early in the second minute the convulsions cease,
often suddenly; simultaneously with the cessation the expiratory
efforts become indistinguishable. The iris is now dilated to a rim;
the eye does not close when the cornea is touched, nor does the pupil
react to light; all reflex reaction to stimuli has ceased. All the
muscles except those of inspiration are flaccid, and the animal lies
in a state of tranquility which contrasts in the most striking way
with the storm which preceded it . . . _Third and fourth minute_. As
death approaches the thoracic and abdominal movements which are
entirely respiratory become slow and slower as well as shallower. . . .
In the spasms which accompany the final gasps of an asphyxiated
animal the head is thrown back, the trunk straightening or arched
backwards, and the limbs are extended while the mouth gapes and the
nostrils dilate. They are called by physiologists stretching
convulsions."

Page 320. "(110).--_Asphyxia by Slow Suffocation_.--When an animal
is allowed to breathe the same quantity of air repeatedly and
continuously out of a bag, the process being of much longer duration,
the phenomena can be studied with greater facility."

After this, is it "ill-natured or ill-mannered" to think that parents
will _not_ be fortunate if "their children fall under the elevating
influence of Dr. Sanderson's scientific and personal character"?

We want to know how medicine is advanced by the agonies of these
suffocated animals?

It may be true that Professor Sanderson at present holds no
certificate, nor does Dr. Michael Foster, who occupies a similar
position at Cambridge, but Dr. Michael Foster has "assistants" who
hold from time to time certificates, and quite lately, "under his
guidance," a lady, Miss Emily Nunn, has been poisoning frogs till
their skin comes off. There is nothing to prevent Professor
Sanderson from employing assistants. The mind may be the mind of
Professor Sanderson, but the knife may be the knife of such a man as
Dr. Klein, who was his former assistant at the Brown Institution, and
who has publicly declared that "he has no regard at all for the
sufferings of the animals."

Your obedient servant,
STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

12 OVINGTON GARDENS, LONDON,
_March_ 13_th_, 1885.

On the publication of this letter the Dean of Christ Church of that day, Dean Liddell, wrote to me a long rambling letter which I could not then, and cannot now, publish because it concludes with these words:--

I have written this not for publication. I will not engage in
newspaper controversy. I write to you, out of respect for the name
you bear,--not in anger but in sorrow.

To this I replied:

To my letter in the Press you have no word to offer. In it I quote
verbatim Professor Sanderson's own description of one of the many
wanton torments that he has inflicted upon the good creatures of God.
I ask how medicine is advanced by the agonies of the dogs he has
slowly suffocated, and I get no answer (though I have sent the letter
to him and some twenty other vivisectors) but this expression from
you of sorrow that the name I bear should be ranged on the side of
this man's opponents.

Sir, I am a young man, unskilled in polemics and unpractised in the
art of advocacy, no match for one of mature age, ripe experience, and
stored learning; but if an enthusiasm for mercy, a belief that human
life itself is not fitly bought by the torturing of the helpless, an
amazement that any Christian, nay that any man should call one of
these tormentors "friend," be sentiments the holding of which by one
of my name fills you with sorrow if not with anger, it without doubt
is plain that our name is but a name to you, and that your respect
for it should have been withdrawn when it first came into prominence.

I do not believe you know what things these men have done; it is a
terrible task for any man to read their literature; if you had done
so I do indeed believe that not your sorrow only but your anger would
be deeply roused, but--not against me.

I remain, Sir,
Faithfully and Respectfully yours,
STEPHEN COLERIDGE.

It gives me peculiar pleasure to bring up this letter from the now distant past; thirty-two years have not made me wish to withdraw or change a word of it.