"The vivisector, when he stands over his animal, whether with anæsthetics or without anæsthetics, is creating, even if the physical health of the nation is enhanced by it, a moral shroud not only for himself, but a moral shroud the edges of which are continually extending into the thought atmosphere, and so deadening the national conscience at large." (Mr. Herbert Burrows.) "The developed taste for blood and cruelty must in the end find its full satisfaction in the vivisection of human beings when they have the misfortune to come under the power of our future doctors." (Bishop Bagshawe.) Here, in these five sentences taken merely out of the heap, is the ethical argument; so facile, so pleasant to self, so confident of a good hearing. No wonder that the societies, now that the facts of science are too strong for them, are falling back on the facts of ethics. In the beginning, thirty years ago, they were created out of ethics; they were born auspiciously. What a welcome they had! Tennyson and Browning and Ruskin, Westcott and Martineau, the late Lord Shaftesbury, and her Majesty the late Queen--these all, and many more, among whom were some of the best men and women of the Victorian Age, were their friends. There never was a cause that enjoyed a better send-off. Everything was in its favour. Magendie and Schiff and Mantegazza had made people sick of experiments on animals. The advocates of the method had not very much to show on its behalf; no bacteriology, save as a far-off vision; no great discoveries lately in physiology or pathology. Thirty years ago, good and true men fought a way for the Act; and there are few now who think the worse of them for it, or grudge them that victory. But, though ethics may be the same always, yet the arguments from them are not. The ethical argument now--we try to find it, and it takes all shapes, and vanishes in a cloud of foul language. That text about the sparrows, which is never quoted in full; that fear about the vivisection of hospital patients; and all that nonsense about moral shrouds, and serpents in the desert, and developed tastes for blood; and Mr. Bernard Shaw, who on May 22nd, 1900, suggests to the National Society that "_the laceration of living flesh quickens the blood of the vivisector as the blood of the hunter, the debauchee, or the beast of prey is undoubtedly quickened in such ways_,"[48] and a week later, before the London Society, dogmatically postulates humaneness as a condition of worthy personal character; and the lady who says, _Oh, Pharisees and hypocrites! Oh, cruel and ruthless egotists!_ and the Falstaff's army of the osteopath, and the fruitarian, and the _anti_ this, that, and the other, who follow the cause; and all these discordant societies, and the begging for money--where, in all this confusion, can we find the ethical argument? Mercy is admirable, but I will wait till mercy and truth are met together.