3. (Annual Meeting, St. James's Hall, May 1901.)--"If this were not enough, the late Home Secretary has told us the facts. I have Hansard here. On July 24th, 1899, the late Home Secretary in his place in Parliament, and in his official capacity as Home Secretary, told us that 'serious experiments, in which the use of anæsthetics have been wholly or partially dispensed with,' do take place in English laboratories. We know, therefore, that torture does take place." [49] This should be 1899. Each of the three speakers uses this phrase as a final and irresistible argument. _If you are still unconvinced. If you want any further proof. If this were not enough_--they all of them play the Home Secretary, as a sure card: at Queen's Hall, at St. James's Hall, they produce him as though it were indeed unanswerable. Since they are willing to go back to July, let us take them back to May. This phrase about "serious experiments" was spoken on July 24th, 1899. On May 9th of that year, a question was put and answered in the House. It was put by the same gentleman who put the question in July; it was answered by the same Home Secretary; and it was practically the same question. The Home Secretary, in his answer to it, said:-- "The sole use of this Certificate (B) is to authorise the keeping alive of the animal, after the influence of the anæsthetic has passed off, for the purpose of observation and study. I should certainly not allow any certificate involving dissections or painful operations without the fresh use of anæsthetics." Here, in May 1899, we have this emphatic statement, that Certificate B is _not_ allowed for "serious operations without anæsthetics." Why did the National Society stop at July? If it had only gone a few weeks further back, a surprise was in store for it. But at July it stuck; thus it was still able to say all sorts of things about "legalised torture." So late as May 6th, 1902, at the great annual meeting at St. James's Hall, the Rev. Reginald Talbot said:-- "Certificate B makes it necessary that the operator should produce complete anæsthesia during the initial operation, but (please mark this) after the initial operation is over, after the animal has returned to the state of semi or complete consciousness, there is then allowed by this certificate a period of observation upon a semi-sensible or completely sensible animal. The animal is opened, is disembowelled, and in that condition his vital organs can be probed and stimulated. Now that is something more than pain; it deserves something more than the name of even severe and prolonged pain. Surely this comes within the tract and region of what we may call agony." As for Certificate A, the inoculations-certificate, which is used for inoculations only, and therefore is granted for nine experiments out of every ten, he said:--