THE CLERGY AND VIVISECTION.
pro TIM EDITOR Or TEL "BPECTATOR."1 SIE"—Mr. Collier, in his letter in your current issue, has indeed —albeit, unconsciously—revealed the reason why many of the clergy have remained supine on this question. If, when the conscience of the nation was first roused on the subject of negro slavery, they had indolently accepted the assurances of the slaveholders that the institution was "useful," and that "every precaution was taken" to prevent Legree from flogging Uncle Tom to death, and had soothed their flocks by referring com- placently to couleur-de-rose reports drawn up from memoranda furnished exclusively by slave-drivers, then their position would have been precisely parallel to that which Mr. Collier repre- sents that his friend, the "hard-working Vicar," now occupies.
The further readiness (may I not call it recklessness ?) where- with the advocates of vivisection permit themselves to misquote the "existing laws" (by which I presume Mr. Collier intends to indicate the Vivisection Act of 1876) is also well exemplified by his concluding paragraph and your succinct refutation of it. If we anti-vivisectionists could be convicted of half as many mis-statements regarding the provisions of that Act as have been publicly made during the last year by the advocates of vivisection, both in Parliament and at Orford, and again and again in newspapers and at meetings (each mis-statement singularly serving its purpose for the moment), we should richly deserve the charge of indifference to veracity which it has been attempted (quite vainly) to fasten upon us as a party.
Let me add one word of respectful entreaty to your clerical readers with reference to our petitions, which, thanks to your kindness in publishing my first letter, are now receiving very numerous and influential signatures. They—the clergy —are told by a number of men of the highest character and consideration, the leaders of our Society,—men whom it is impossible to treat as fools or knaves,—that a great offence is , being daily committed against God's creatures, and a direful new vice is springing up and rooting itself in the chief seats of our national education. They are now formally invited by these eminent men to aid them in stopping this offence, and in preventing the growth of this new vice. It will not, I respectfully submit, in the least discharge their solemn responsibility in this matter to accept without scrutiny the off-hand assertion of the first doctor they chance to ask, that vivisection is " useful ;" nor yet such rash mistatemeuts as to the provisions of the Vivisection Act as may be offered to them by advocates of the practice like Mr. Collier.
Copies of the Act 39 and .40 Viet., c. 77, with a commentary thereon by the Hon. Bernard Coleridge, together with every other information, will be gladly furnished, gratis, to any clergy- man applying for them to B. Bryan, Esq., 1 Victoria Street,
P.S.—Mr. Collier tells us that his "best friend" is his dog. I am thankful to say I have many human friends dearer and nearer than my dog ; but if the last of them and least beloved, human or canine, were liable to be legally tortured by Drs. Rutherford or Roy, I think I should take a little more pains than Mr. Collier has done to satisfy myself whether the "ex- isting laws" really do provide that the mangling should take place under anmsthetics, or leave it optional to the experimenter to obtain a certificate to dispense with them and use curari in- stead. It is not, I fear, a great privilege to be even the "best friend" of an advocate of vivisection.
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