"But how infinitely more wisely and economically would these results have come if the physiologists as a body had met public opinion half- way long ago, agreed that the situation was a genuinely ethical one, and that their corporate responsibility was involved, and had given up the preposterous claim that every scientist has an unlimited right to vivisect, for the amount or mode of which no man, not even a colleague, can call him to account.[1] "The fear of State rules and inspectors on the part of the investigators is, I think, well founded; they would probably mean either stupid interference or become a sham. But the public demand for regulation rests on a perfectly sound ethical principle, the denial of which by the scientists speaks ill for either their moral sense or their political ability. So long as the physiologists disclaim corporate responsibility, formulate no code of vivisectional ethics for laboratories to post up and enforce, appoint no censors, pass no votes of condemnation or exclusion, propose of themselves no law, so long must the antivivisectionist agitation, with all its expensiveness, idiocy, bad temper, untruth, and vexatiousness, continue, as the only possible means of bringing home to the careless or callous individual experimenter the fact that the sufferings of HIS animals are somebody else's business as well as his own, and that there is `a God in Israel' to whom he owes account. "WILLIAM JAMES. "Cambridge, Mass., "May 5 (1909)." [1] "Unnecessary and offensive in the highest degree would it be, ... by legislation of any kind, to attempt to dictate or control how, and by whom, and for what purposes, and under what conditions and upon what animals in the laboratories, ... experiments should be made. The decision in these matters SHOULD BE LEFT WHOLLY TO THOSE IN CHARGE OF THESE INSTITUTIONS."--From a memorial of Dr. Simon Flexner, Dr. W. T. Councilman, Dr. H. C. Ernst, and other members of the Association of American Physicians against Senate Bill regulating vivisection in the District of Columbia, May 4, 1896. This is a very strong indictment. If he misunderstood the antivivisectionists, we must remember that Henry Clay in 1851 could see nothing good in William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition party. But James knew precisely what the vivisection of animals meant, for he had taught physiology, and had been engaged in experimentation for more than a quarter of a century. When he speaks of the power of "club opinion to quell independence of mind," he explains a situation which otherwise might remain obscure. When he asserts that certain groups "cannot be trusted to be truthful or moral," we have the explanation of a philosopher who was not given to over-statement.