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.”

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the University Gazette also had the effrontery to leave a letter from Ruskin, giving the reasons for his resignation, unpublished; and the Pall Mall Gazette crowned the edifice of poltroonery by announcing that he had resigned owing to his “advancing years.”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 for the erection of a laboratory for the vivisector and £2,000 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 3rd, 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 6th, 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 13th, 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.