I am afraid [he wrote] my answer must be in a sense which you will think unfavourable. I could not commit myself out of Parliament to any view which I am not prepared to defend _in_ it. And the unreasonableness and what I think wrongdoing of the Medical Men would not justify me as a legislator in voting for what _I_ think wrong merely in opposition to them or because I could not bring them to terms which I think just and right. I do not say that this is at all necessarily the rule for a person out of Parliament, because so long as you do not agitate for what you think _wrong_ it is perfectly fair to agitate for more than you expect to get as a means of getting something of what you think right. So that I find no fault whatever with any one who takes the view you take; but my position is somewhat a peculiar one and I must be cautious to an extent that some people may think coldness and weakness. I am not afraid of your judgment however. Six years later, in 1882, he wrote an article in the _Fortnightly Review_ in which he definitely though reluctantly gave his adhesion to total abolition as the goal to be aimed at, but of course he never at any time associated himself with the condemnation of all other measures for the mitigation of the cruelties of the laboratory or of the world at large that has since been pronounced by the more extreme protagonists on the anti-vivisection side of the controversy. This article dealt in a pungent severity with attacks made upon him in the _Nineteenth Century_ by Sir James Paget, Professor Owen and Dr. Wilks. As far as I know none of them rejoined. They had had enough! But the last passage of the article is of a quality that I think my readers will regard as fully justifying my reproducing it here,--I hope it will receive their endorsement--the hand that wrote it has long been still, but thirty-four years have not made one word of it less true or less beautiful.